CHAPTER 38

OF HAWKS AND DOVES, VULTURES AND CHICKENS

IN MANY WAYS, BY1967 HARRYMCPHERSON HAD BECOMEas important to Lyndon Johnson as George Reedy had been during the 1950s—even more, perhaps. McPherson was smart, an intellectual, an idealist, but a practical one—and he was a Texan. LBJ might argue with McPherson, might momentarily bridle at his bluntness, but he trusted McPherson’s judgment, both moral and political. The English major turned lawyer served as LBJ’s eyes and ears in America’s ghettoes, in the Middle East, and in Vietnam. And McPherson was disinterested—a true patriot, as LBJ defined the term. He could see Vietnam with clear eyes. It wasn’t a pretty sight.

In early June, McPherson returned from his latest visit. What struck him first, he told Johnson, was the massive U.S. presence in that tiny country. “At 1500 feet in a Huey on any given afternoon, you look out on two or three Eagle flights of choppers going in to chase VC’s; an air strike in progress; artillery ‘prepping’ another area; a division camp here, a battalion forward area there; trucks moving on a dozen roads … Flying north along the road to Danang, you see why the highway is secure: great areas have been scraped off the hilltops every five miles or so, ringed by 105’s [mobile howitzers] and covered with troops and tents.” The other thing one noticed was the lack of security. “You just can’t go down that country road, although it looks peaceful. You can’t spend the night in this area. You take off from a rice paddy with your .50 caliber gunners aiming at an impassive crowd of peasants standing on a dike. This PF [Popular Forces] outpost was overrun last week.” He could see why the Vietcong continued to gain traction. Corruption was everywhere. The peasants hated the police because they arbitrarily imposed and collected “taxes” on every bag of rice they came upon. “It sounds romantic to say so, but if I were a young peasant living in a hamlet, and had had none of my family hurt or killed by the VC; if I saw that the ridiculous Vietnamese educational system would almost certainly deny me the chance to go beyond the fifth grade; if I was frustrated by the lack of opportunity, and bored by the limited life of the hamlet; if I had no sense of commitment to today’s South Vietnamese action, because the Saigon government had given me no reason to have it; and if I were offered the possibility of adventure, of striking at my Frenchified oppressors and their American allies … I would join up.”¹

 

LYNDONJOHNSON WAS SIMULTANEOUSLYa shrewd rationalist and a hopeless sentimentalist. His acute sense of empathy did not serve him well as commander in chief. By 1966 the Situation Room had grown used to late-night or early-morning calls from the president asking for casualty reports. LBJ forced himself to visit military hospitals in the Washington area, the burn center at Walter Reed Hospital in San Antonio, and wounded veterans during his trips to the Pacific. “I saw him cry a lot over Vietnam,” Marie Fehmer, the secretary who was closest to him, recalled, “mostly at night while we were waiting for the bombing raids … for the boys to come home. Then the next morning he had to sign the letters that went out to the families of the boys who didn’t make it.”²“I am convinced that every casualty report stabbed him to the heart,” George Reedy said. “Sometimes he would pass old friends without even an eye blink of recognition. He was not seeing them because his eyes were focused instead on rice paddies in Vietnam.”³He and Lady Bird began attending two and sometimes three services at various churches on Sunday morning. He was particularly attracted during this period by his daughter Luci’s and Marie Fehmer’s Catholicism. He began dropping in at the tiny Catholic mission in Stonewall, Texas, and struck up a friendship with its assistant priest, Father Wunibald Schneider. In Washington he went to the chapel at Saint Dominic’s Priory to sit and think and pray after the day’s work was done.⁴In the midst of the incredible complexity and ambiguity of the world in which he lived, Johnson was particularly attracted by Catholicism’s simplicity and certainty. He revived an old friendship with the archbishop of San Antonio, Robert E. Lucey.⁵

During his trips to church, LBJ did not always hear what he wanted to hear. On November 11, Lyndon and Lady Bird spent the night in Colonial Williamsburg and the next morning attended services at the Bruton Parish Episcopal Church. In his sermon, the Reverend Cotesworth Pinckney Lewis expressed support and admiration for the president but then launched into a critique of the war. Attacking from the right and the left, he declared first that he was “appalled” at the fact that “this is the only war in our history which has had three times as many civilian as military casualties” (a totally erroneous claim) and then he was “mystified” by news accounts that “our brave fighting units are being inhibited by directives and inadequate equipment from using their capacities to terminate the conflict successfully.” Then, looking LBJ directly in the eye, he asked, “While pledging our loyalty—we ask respectfully, WHY?”⁶LBJ kept his cool, pumping the preacher’s hand after the service, but he was humiliated. “I think our aims … have been very clear,” he subsequently remarked to reporters, “and … I thought that even all the preachers in the country had heard about it.”⁷

 

INMAY,GENERALWESTMORELANDand Admiral Sharp, alarmed by the antiwar movement and general war weariness, decided once again to ask for enough force to deliver a knockout blow. “The Vietnam war is unpopular in this country,” they observed to McNamara. “It is becoming increasingly unpopular as it escalates—causing more American casualties, more fear of its growing into a wider war, more privation of the domestic sector, and more distress at the amount of suffering being visited on the non-combatants in Vietnam, South and North. Most Americans do not know how we got where we are, and most … are convinced that somehow we should not have gotten this deeply in. All want the war ended and expect their President to end it. Successfully or else … This state of mind in the U.S. generates impatience in the political structure of the United States. It unfortunately also generates patience in Hanoi.” What Westmoreland and Sharp asked for were an additional two-hundred-thousand men—half immediately and half in the next fiscal year—and thirteen additional tactical air squadrons for South Vietnam. This would require calling up the reserves, the addition of five hundred thousand men to America’s armed forces, and an increase of nearly $10 million in the defense budget. McNamara told LBJ that such a move would generate irresistible pressure to escalate the war: to move into Cambodia and Laos to eliminate communist sanctuaries; for unlimited bombing of the North; for a blockade of rail, road, and sea routes into North Vietnam; and ultimately, an invasion of the North to control infiltration routes.⁸McNamara, of course, was adamantly opposed to such an escalation. So, too, was his boss.⁹On August 3, LBJ announced that another fifty-five thousand men would be sent to Vietnam and set a new ceiling of 525,000 GIs by June 30, 1968. In light of their intent to turn the war over to the South Vietnamese, anything above this would be counterproductive, he had concluded.¹⁰

In truth, Westmoreland, Sharp, and Wheeler had long since accommodated themselves to fighting the war within the restraints that politics placed on them. However, other service chiefs and their allies in Congress had not and were growing restive by the summer of 1967. The second week in July, two marine companies operating in the jungle near Con Thien in the narrow neck of northern South Vietnam were ambushed and nearly annihilated by a force of more than one thousand North Vietnamese Army soldiers. The enemy, able to operate freely north of the DMZ and in Laos and Cambodia, had managed to infiltrate behind U.S. lines. In the initial onslaught, one entire American company was wiped out. “We were all wounded,” recalled Corporal Mike Hughes, “and the men were just lying there firing. I shouted, ‘get up and move back,’ and somebody said, ‘We can’t.’ I said: ‘You want to live you got to move.’ ” By the time U.S. fighter bombers and a relief column arrived, nearly all of the marines had been killed or wounded. “Bodies of dead American marines lay everywhere, and there was evidence that the North Vietnamese had executed some of the wounded after overrunning the U.S. positions,” the combat reporter accompanying the unit later wrote.¹¹Westmoreland won permission to conduct secret sweeps north of the DMZ south of the Ben Hai River. He subsequently reported that these operations were successful, but American casualties were high because of enemy artillery fire north of the river. Washington refused to give him permission to go further north or to conduct sweeps into Cambodia and Laos.¹²

Bombing in the North remained limited. American aircraft were permitted to hit electrical stations and petroleum depots in and around Hanoi but not Haiphong. “The Haiphong Port is the single most vulnerable and important point in the lines of communications system of North Vietnam,” General Wheeler complained. “In March, 142,700 metric tons of cargo passed through the port.”¹³In June, U.S. aircraft attacking an anti-aircraft battery at Cam Pha, fifty miles north of Haiphong, struck the Soviet freightersTurkestan andMikhail Frunze. Washington quickly apologized and promised Moscow that in the future no harm would come to their vessels.¹⁴“We have hit two ships,” LBJ subsequently commented to a group of labor leaders. “You know how emotions run in this country when ships are hit. Remember theLusitania. We do not want to get the Soviet Union and China into this war.”¹⁵

The first week in September the military staged a minor revolt. As General W. E. Depuy of the JCS staff argued, “If U.S. disengagement has the flavor of a military defeat, or even military frustration, it will take years to repair the damage to morale, the traditions, and even the concept for employment of military forces in the national defense.”¹⁶That week, Army Chief of Staff Harold Johnson and Marine Commandant Wallace Greene testified before Stennis’s Senate Preparedness Subcommittee that McNamara and civilian authorities were preventing the military from taking the steps necessary to win the war. Both generals advocated attacking Haiphong, mining the harbor, and bombing five targets in the thirty-mile buffer zone near China. Greene and Stennis subsequently took their campaign for wider bombing to the American Legion convention in Boston. The commandant of the marines called the Vietnam War more important than urban unrest, and warned that if the United States didn’t win, “We’re not going to have any city problems … to worry about.” In a blistering report, the Stennis committee charged that McNamara’s “gradual” approach had allowed Hanoi to build up “the world’s most formidable anti-aircraft defense” and in this way “almost certainly contributed” to heavy U.S. losses.¹⁷

LBJ worked to repair the damage, calling a news conference to inform reporters that the differences between McNamara and the chiefs had been blown all out of proportion. Privately, the president told Harold Johnson and his colleagues to come up with some imaginative ideas to bring the war to a conclusion. “He said he did not want them to just recommend more men or that we drop the Atom bomb,” the notes of the meeting recorded LBJ as saying. “The President said he could think of those ideas.”¹⁸“Bus,” he told Wheeler, “your generals almost destroyed us with their testimony before the Stennis Committee.”¹⁹It should be noted that at this point Westmoreland and his colleagues were being less than candid with the White House, the press, and the public regarding the course of the war. Westmoreland had steadfastly maintained that the United States was winning the war, that it had turned the tide, and that the two-year buildup of American men and matériel was beginning to have its effect. The enemy was hurting, and if the pressure were increased he would, in the foreseeable future, collapse. This was particularly true of the war against NVA main force units. Yet, at a Military Assistance Command (Vietnam) Commander’s Conference in Saigon in mid-May, he had noted, “The main force war is accelerating at a rapid, almost alarming rate … The NVA is taking over the main front war in I, II, and III Corps. This relieves the VC to move to the local level … Infiltration continues and at a greater rate than in the past. Individuals and units are better equipped and have some of the best weapons from the USSR; we now are seeing much anti-tank, rocket, and recoilless rifle capability.”²⁰Westmoreland told Johnson what he thought he wanted to hear, even when he knew the truth lay elsewhere.

Thanks to McPherson and others, however, Lyndon Johnson had a relatively accurate picture of the actual situation in South Vietnam. Following his trip to Southeast Asia in October 1966, McNamara reported, “By and large, the people in rural areas believe that the GVN [government of Vietnam] when it comes will not stay but that the VC will; that cooperation with the GVN will be punished by the VC; that the GVN is really indifferent to the people’s welfare: that the low-level GVN are tools of the local rich; and that the GVN is ridden with corruption.”²¹LBJ was much impressed with an unofficial evaluation of the situation by Michael Deutsch, a U.S. aid worker who had just returned from a year in Vietnam. “I have a visceral feeling that we underestimate the size, organization and potential threat of the VC terrorist machine in the south, which the GVN cannot eradicate … I doubt that the new … U.S. organization can achieve tangible results at this late date, or that the underpaid ARVN [Army of the Republic of Vietnam], lacking in ideology, can be trained fast enough to actually clear and hold the villages and swing the people away from the VC.”²²

Johnson wanted elections in South Vietnam and he wanted them to be as free as possible in order to have a viable entity capable of temporarily taking over the war and negotiating a political settlement with the National Liberation Front. “We do not want to conquer Vietnam,” he told news anchor Harry Reasoner. “All we want to do is to prevent them from taking South Vietnam by force. If they take it by votes, that’s a different matter, ok … When infiltration and violence ceases, we will get out. We may go to Thailand or to the Philippines, but we will get out. I told Kosygin that.”²³National Security Adviser Walt Rostow put it well. There was a direct corollary between the “Negro problem” in the United States and pacification in Vietnam. Whether one was talking about peasants and workers in South Vietnam, the disadvantaged of America’s ghettoes, or the struggling masses of the third world in Latin America and Asia, the heart of the matter was self-determination.²⁴

Central to Johnson’s hopes was a new South Vietnamese constitution, written in April, calling for elections for the presidency and Senate on September 1 and the lower House on October 1. Following the constitutional convention, Dr. Phan Quang Dan, who had been imprisoned for two years under Diem, called on Henry Cabot Lodge to congratulate the Americans on their light hand. The constitution, most delegates felt, was an authentic Vietnamese document, rather than a tract dictated by occupiers. To a remarkable degree, U.S. authorities allowed matters to take their course, providing aid and advice to all candidates.²⁵In the weeks that followed, the American mission turned its efforts to preventing the Military Revolutionary Council from intimidating the opposition and rigging the election. A task, as it turned out, that proved to be a full-time job.

“If the military establishment can agree on a single slate and a single presidential candidate to support,” the CIA reported, “none of the potential civilian candidates appears likely to develop the organization and broad spectrum of support necessary to seriously contest the military’s choice.”²⁶The two top contenders were Ky, a northerner and a Catholic, and Nguyen Van Thieu, a southerner and a Buddhist-turned-Catholic. During the previous year, the American mission had become increasingly impressed with Thieu. He seemed to West-moreland and Ellsworth Bunker less impulsive, less ambitious, a shrewder judge of domestic and world opinion than Ky.²⁷

On May 5, Ky announced to his fellow officers that he was going to be a candidate for president. Complaints began to trickle in from the civilian aspirants that the government would not allow opposition newspapers to operate and would not permit television time to be sold to nonmilitary politicians. A month later, on June 14, Thieu threw his hat in the ring. The American mission’s nightmare had at last come true; the military was split. The Military Revolutionary Council held a climactic meeting over the weekend of June 28-30 to resolve the matter before the campaign went any further. “Sessions were long, emotional, and sometimes heated,” Westmoreland confided to his diary. On the evening of the 29th it was decided that Thieu would be chief of the armed forces and Ky would continue to run for president. The following morning, Thieu announced that he would resign from the army and run as a civilian candidate. As pressure and dissension mounted, Ky suddenly announced that he would withdraw and return to the air force. To everyone’s surprise, Thieu declared that this would be unacceptable. It was then that the two decided to campaign on the same ticket, with Thieu as the presidential candidate and Ky as the vice presidential.²⁸The election outcome was now a foregone conclusion.

 

IF DISSENT WAS WITHERINGon the vine in South Vietnam, it was blooming in America. The summer featured three new antiwar initiatives. On April 24 in New York, in an effort to mobilize politically moderate, socially conventional Americans concerned about the war, King, Rauh, Galbraith, Schlesinger, and Victor Reuther of the UAW established a new organization, Negotiations Now! Projecting an image of reason and fairness, the organizers called for an unconditional bombing halt, a cease-fire in the South, and internationally supervised elections. At the same time, other antiwar activists announced in Cambridge the formation of Vietnam Summer. Modeled after the 1964 Mississippi Summer project, Vietnam Summer was intended to train students in the techniques of peaceful protest. Finally, on thirty college campuses, students and faculty established draft resistance movements. By the summer, they had begun to move beyond the walls of academia to recruit in working-class neighborhoods and even the ghettoes.²⁹Then, on Tuesday, October 17, thirty-five hundred radicals tried to shut down the army induction center in Oakland, California. When the police broke up the picket lines, sending some twenty people to the hospital, ten thousand outraged Berkeley residents gathered to protest. Two thousand police confronted them. Fighting erupted, and the melee eventually encompassed more than twenty city blocks.

Johnson had no sympathy whatsoever with draft card burners, and he periodically needled Ramsey Clark about his reluctance to prosecute those who openly defied conscription. But it also came to his notice that a large number of young Americans were quietly and effectively using legal means to avoid serving in Vietnam. In mid-1966Newsweek ran an article entitled “The Draft: The Unjust vs. the Unwilling.” While some young men were publicly registering their dissent by fleeing to Canada and destroying their draft cards—and usually suffering for it—a far greater proportion of draft-age Americans were joining national guard units, flocking to graduate schools, making sudden decisions to join the Peace Corps, and doing everything in their power to fail their draft physicals. “For the first time in American history,” Newsweek noted, “avoidance of service at a time when U.S. soldiers were at war and casualty lists were mounting had become socially acceptable.”³⁰Angered by the draft resistance movement, hawks in Congress were ready to consider legislation making it a criminal offense not only to refuse service but to advocate draft dodging. “Let’s forget the First Amendment,” proclaimed Louisiana Democrat F. Edward Hebert. Congress had to act, Mendell Rivers declared: “The Justice Department hasn’t got the nerve to prosecute these riff-raff.”³¹

LBJ and his aides worried that conservatives would come to view the poor and especially minorities as unpatriotic, or at least to portray them as such, as part of an effort to discredit the Great Society programs. “We must denounce those who are trying to divide the poor and the rest of the country,” Harry McPherson told his boss. The administration must make the point that “every American, no matter what his economic condition, race or creed, has a vital stake in the defense of freedom in Viet Nam.”³²In July 1966, the president had named a National Advisory Commission on Selective Service headed by Burke Marshall, by then known for his prominent role in the federal government’s struggle against racial violence and injustice in the South, to examine the draft and make recommendations for change. The original Selective Service Act had been passed in 1940—Johnson was fond of recalling his role in pushing that controversial measure through the House—but was allowed to lapse for a period after the end of World War II, only to be revived in 1948. It compelled all eighteen-year-olds to register, and provided for drafting the oldest first out of the prime eighteen-to-twenty-six-year-olds. Deferments were available for those enrolled in postsecondary institutions, for married fathers, and for those working in selected fields deemed important to the national interest. On March 6, 1967, Johnson forwarded his recommended changes, based on the findings of the Marshall Commission. Among the most important provisions were these: nineteen-year-olds were to be drafted first; no further postgraduate deferments would be allowed except for medical and dental school; and Selective Service would establish a fair and impartial random system of selection. He noted that a majority of the commission wanted to do away with college deferments altogether but that he and his advisers had decided that the disruption in a young man’s life would be greater if service came at the end of high school rather than college.³³In an attempt to satisfy hawks, Johnson and Clark announced that individuals who did something improper affecting their own status—burning their draft card, for example—would have their draft into the service accelerated as promptly as possible; all who violated federal law by doing something improper against the system generally—blocking a troop train, for example—would be promptly prosecuted by the Justice Department.³⁴

 

CONGRESS, THE HOTHOUSE THAT HADnurtured Johnson, the well-spring of both the New Deal and the Great Society, was now his enemy. Mills was blocking the much-needed surtax. Rivers and Stennis were attacking from the right, Fulbright and Bobby Kennedy from the left. Mike Mansfield, the taciturn Montanan, was proving increasingly ineffectual. So much for the Democrats. Dirksen and Ford, the Republicans, were acting as a chorus to Democratic hawks, denouncing the administration for doing nothing to save the cities, while moving to cut appropriations for programs that were designed to rehabilitate the nation’s ghettoes. Periodically, Johnson would have Mansfield, Dirksen, and even Fulbright to the White House and ask them to hold off or at least tone down congressional hearings on the war. He would even give them the latest top-secret information on back-channel contacts with the North Vietnamese. The solons would express sympathy, and then return to their respective chambers to pound away again.³⁵

Inevitably, Johnson would lose his temper. In a late February 1967 meeting with congressional leaders, he read a letter from John Steinbeck, who then had two sons serving in Vietnam: “In our anxiety about liberty, we’ve spawned anarchy. I have not the slightest doubt that the protest marchers, the full-page advertisements, the attacks on what is called our foreign policy, the shrill and fully reported cries that we get out of Vietnam and leave these people and the rest of Southeast Asia to mass murder—I believe that these activities and the political main-chancing have prolonged the war, have been responsible for the death and the crippling of our finest and our bravest young men … And I am angry at the bastards who find patriotism a dirty word, and gallantry in bad taste.”³⁶Johnson also played the race card. “Fulbright and Lippmann … will protect the whites and they do not care for the colored,” he told Indian journalist Durga Das. “I stand for all alike, for the colored who are two-thirds of the people of the world.”³⁷These outbursts in turn produced a spate of essays by Walter Lippmann, Hans Morgenthau, and others to the effect that LBJ was a would-be dictator intent on crushing dissent and destroying the Bill of Rights.

Meanwhile, relations between the White House and the press went from bad to worse. The administration continued to be dismayed by what it considered biased and irresponsible reporting on the war in Vietnam in both the United States and South Vietnam. In conversation with William McAndrew, president of NBC News, LBJ said that in his opinion all the networks, with the possible exception of ABC, were slanted against him. They were “infiltrated,” and he had “to be ready to move on them if they move on us.”³⁸American reporters were “immature, naïve and hostile,” Bus Wheeler observed during a meeting with the president and his foreign policy advisers. “They are out there to win Pulitzer prizes for sensational articles rather than objective reporting,” remarked another in attendance.³⁹Every effort by Rostow, McPherson, and Robert Kintner, hired by the White House to improve media relations, to work out a rapproachment between LBJ and the press failed. “I thought you were pretty abrupt at the beginning of the CBS meeting tonight,” McPherson commented after one presidential encounter with the media. “You kept challenging your questioner to tell you who said what about the bombing, indicating … that he was a boob to bring it up at all. I thought you bullied him pretty bad, and changed what felt like a pretty receptive occasion into a somber affair.”⁴⁰Some of the reporting was in truth harsh and negative, but LBJ was naïve and self-deluding to expect otherwise. Generally, the press reported what the administration knew to be true: South Vietnam was not a viable country, politically, economically, or militarily. Neil Sheehan and David Halberstam could see what McNamara and McPherson could see. Moreover, the White House’s rhetorical efforts to steer a middle course between hawks and doves at home made it appear at times that it was doing one thing and saying another.⁴¹

In July 1967,Newsweek published a Louis Harris poll that was surprising, given the national hysteria that was allegedly gripping the country. On Vietnam, LBJ received a 46 percent approval rating, up from 41 percent two months earlier. His overall approval rating was an astonishing 62 percent. Indeed, as far as the conflict in Southeast Asia was concerned, Johnson seemed to be doing more or less what the vast majority wanted.⁴²Americans continued to believe that it was in the nation’s interests to make a stand against the forces of international communism somewhere in South Asia and that Ho and the NVA represented the forces of international communism. But those figures were an outgrowth of a “support our troops” mentality. By October polls indicated that although 58 percent of those questioned continued to support the war, 69 percent disapproved of the way the conflict was being handled.⁴³Lack of clear and consistent justification continued to be an issue: “The problem is that people still can’t get it deeply in their bones that we ought to be in Vietnam,” McPherson advised Johnson. “What difference does it make to us? Even if he wins, Ho poses no threat to the United States. It is silly to talk about a rag tail revolutionary like Ho attacking Hawaii or California … Talk about defending freedom in the South also falls on deaf ears. South Vietnam is a semi-country run by a junta of generals who were raised in the North and imposed on the South. Why should we care if their own people knock them off?”⁴⁴

In an effort to deflate antiwar critics on the left, reassure moderate opinion that he was indeed focused on negotiations, and pressure the Saigon government to get its house in order, LBJ broached a new peace formula during a speech at a National Legislative Conference in San Antonio. The plan was one that had been put to Hanoi by Harvard academic and sometime diplomat Henry Kissinger during a new peace initiative that had begun in late July. Through two French intermediaries, Kissinger, as authorized by the State Department, had suggested that the United States would be willing to stop the aerial and naval bombardment of North Vietnam if this would lead “promptly to productive discussions between representatives of the U.S. and DRV [Democratic Republic of Vietnam].” The discussions could proceed either publicly or secretly; it was up to Hanoi. In turn, “the DRV would not take advantage of the bombing cessation.”⁴⁵

Instead of rejecting the proposal out of hand, Pham Van Dong insisted on the unconditional and permanent cessation of bombing raids against the North, but then went on to make some conciliatory statements. The NLF would have to be “present” when South Vietnamese matters were discussed, but the United States would not have to commit to dealing exclusively with the NLF in matters of war and peace or recognize the NLF as the genuine voice of the South Vietnamese people. He also acknowledged that U.S. troops would have to remain in the South until a political settlement was worked out.⁴⁶In early September, the United States had scaled back its bombing campaign in the North. Two weeks passed without anything meaningful coming out of Hanoi or Paris. LBJ’s frustration began to show. During an interview with an Australian broadcaster on September 20, he complained that the media was ignoring the restraint he was showing. “But the television doesn’t want that story,” he declared. “I can prove that Ho is a son-of-a-bitch if you let me put it on the screen but they [the networks] want me to be the son-of-a-bitch … NBC and theNew York Times are committed to an editorial policy of making us surrender.”⁴⁷

During a meeting with his advisers a week later, LBJ complained that the North Vietnamese “are playing us for suckers. They have no more intention of talking than we have of surrendering.”⁴⁸He now wanted to not only resume bombing but to escalate. Nick Katzenbach, as head of the informal interdepartmental committee on Vietnam, tried to dissuade him. “The significance of the Paris-Kissinger exercise lies in the fact that it is the closest thing we have yet had to establishing a dialogue with North Vietnam,” he observed to LBJ.⁴⁹Johnson agreed to give peace one more chance.

In San Antonio the president unveiled his new formula. “The United States is willing to stop all aerial and naval bombardment of North Vietnam, when this will lead promptly to productive discussions,” he proclaimed. “We, of course, assume that while discussions proceed, North Vietnam would not take advantage of the bombing cessation or limitation,” meaning it would not accelerate the flow of men and supplies into the South nor launch new military initiatives. The press generally hailed the “San Antonio Formula,” which in fact was a significant departure from previous offers that had required an end to infiltration, but nothing came of it.⁵⁰There is some doubt that LBJ ever believed North Vietnam would agree to negotiate. During one meeting with Johnson and his foreign policy advisers, Dean Acheson observed, “We must understand that we are not going to have negotiations. The bombing has no effect on negotiations. When these fellows decide they can’t defeat the South, then they will give up. This is the way it was in Korea. This is the way the Communists operate.”⁵¹If the San Antonio Formula was not going to get negotiations started, John Roche observed to his boss, nothing would. “I doubt if Hanoi would negotiate now if you offered them California,” he quipped. “Tell him I agree with that,” LBJ scribbled on the memo.⁵²

Meanwhile, the antiwar movement continued to fragment between moderates and radicals. On Labor Day weekend some three thousand delegates from 372 organizations gathered at the Palmer House in Chicago to attend the first convention of the National Conference for a New Politics. No one knew what the “new politics” was, exactly, and the proceedings quickly degenerated into a scene, as one observer put it, “worthy of Genet or Pirandello, with whites masquerading as either poor or black, blacks posing as revolutionaries or as arrogant whites, conservatives pretending to be communists, women feigning to be the oppressed, and liberals pretending not to be there at all.”⁵³A 150-member black delegation demanded that the gathering pass a resolution denouncing Zionism and calling for immediate reparations payments to all African Americans. Shortly thereafter, forty antiwar radicals met with North Vietnamese and NLF representatives in Czechoslovakia. SDS leader Tom Hayden attended and was quoted afterward: “Now we’re all Viet Cong.”⁵⁴

The outrageous activities of the far left seemed to momentarily unhinge LBJ. Up to this point, aside from an occasional rhetorical outburst, the president had weathered the domestic storm over the war with relatively little stress.⁵⁵But the antics of would-be revolutionaries, especially in Washington, D.C., a city he loved, threatened to push him over the edge. A week after fifty thousand protesters tried to shut down the Pentagon, he burst out, “I’m not going to let the Communists take this government and they’re doing it right now.” He told his advisers that he had been protecting civil liberties “since he was nine years old,” but “I told the Attorney General that I am not going to let two-hundred-thousand of these people ruin everything for the 200 million Americans. I’ve got my belly full of seeing these people put on a Communist plane and shipped all over this country.”⁵⁶Johnson instructed the CIA to place leaders of the SDS, SANE, the Yippies (Youth International Party), Mothers Against the War, and other antiwar groups under surveillance and to do everything possible to gather evidence that they were communist-controlled, even operating on orders from foreign governments. This program, later institutionalized as Operation Chaos, violated the CIA’s charter, which prohibited domestic operations.

The war against the peace movement soon shifted from surveillance to harassment and disruption. Dr. Spock, among others, was indicted for counseling draft resistance. Agents provocateur penetrated various organizations, encouraging division, sabotaging demonstrations, and gathering evidence of illegal activities. Not surprisingly, the FBI got into the act. Shortly after the Vietnam Veterans Against the War was formed, Hoover’s men infiltrated the organization, encouraging activities that they hoped would discredit the movement.⁵⁷Still, violations of civil liberties during the Vietnam conflict were insignificant compared to other wars. In this respect, LBJ compared favorably with Abraham Lincoln and, if anyone, resembled Jefferson Davis. Davis, fighting for slavery, tended to permit too much democracy and dissent within his country, whereas Lincoln, fighting for human freedom, succeeded in part because he was willing to crack down on domestic dissent.

As his hopes for peace foundered, LBJ decided to keep up the military pressure on the North Vietnamese and Vietcong through the 1968 presidential election. “If we cannot get negotiations,” he asked McNamara and Wheeler during a meeting in the last week in October, “why don’t we hit all the military targets short of provoking Russia and China? It astounds me that our boys in Vietnam have such good morale with all of this going on.”⁵⁸On November 17, West-moreland outlined his plan of operation for 1968, which he codenamed York. It called for action against the enemy command center in the Vietcong’s Military Region 5 in the Central Highlands, while the second phase would consist of destroying Vietcong munitions and supply stockpiles in the Ashau Valley. A third force composed of the 1st Air Cavalry would be assembled to be used either to launch an amphibious hook north of the DMZ or, if that proved politically impossible, to sweep clear of enemy troops the provinces from Quang Tri to Quang Ngai. Referring to the 525,000-troop level that had been authorized, Westmoreland told the chiefs, “For the first time I will have enough troops to really start grinding them down.”⁵⁹

 

IN THE MIDST OF THIS PLANNING,the White House announced that Robert McNamara was resigning as secretary of defense to take a job as head of the World Bank. The circumstances surrounding McNamara’s departure were a matter of intense speculation in the media and on the Georgetown cocktail circuit. Rumor had it that the defense chief was near a nervous breakdown. He looked haggard, and despite his twice-a-week squash games with Orville Freeman, jowly. His wife, Marge, was suffering from an ulcer, and it was well-known that his children were adamantly opposed to the war. Stories circulated of his ranting incoherence and tearful breakdowns. LBJ reportedly expressed the fear that McNamara would “pull a Forrestal” on him, that is, commit suicide. In a subsequent interview with historian Bob Dallek, McNamara offered a qualified denial. Rumors of his “emotional and physical collapse” were greatly exaggerated, he said. “I was indeed feeling stress. I was at loggerheads with the President of the United States; I was not getting answers to my questions; and I was tense as hell. But, I was not under medical care, not taking drugs except for an occasional sleeping pill, and never contemplated suicide.”⁶⁰In truth, McNamara was tired of presiding over a stalemate, tired of getting kicked simultaneously by Stennis and Fulbright, and desirous of campaigning openly for Bobby Kennedy in 1968. Larry O’Brien recalled that in 1967 the defense secretary had come around to his office to “make a strong pitch that Bobby should run for president.” As an alternative, O’Brien suggested that they work internally to change Johnson’s position on the war. No, McNamara had said, it was imperative that Kennedy run and be the party’s nominee.⁶¹McNamara would, however, continue in office for five months after the announcement of his departure.

The civilian whiz kids in the Pentagon were by this point almost to a person opposed to continuation of the war. It was time for a political solution in the South—now. “There is only one answer,” McNamara confided to Averell Harriman. “representatives of the VC must be admitted to the coalition government and the VC recognized as a legitimate party.”⁶²At lunch on November 1, McNamara told the president “that continuation of our present action in Southeast Asia would be dangerous, costly in lives, and unsatisfactory to the American people.” He gave him a memorandum outlining an alternative course, namely, to announce “a policy of stabilization of our military effort, with no further increase in American force levels and no expansion of the war against the North … To further increase support for the war effort and to probe the possibilities of a negotiated settlement, I recommend we plan on a halt in the bombing of the North.” He emphasized the pointlessness of further buildup. “The additional numbers of combat troops will not produce any significant change in the nature of our military operations,” he wrote. “The increase in numbers is likely to lead to a proportionate increase in encounters with the enemy, and some increase in the number of casualties inflicted on both sides. But neither the addition of troops not scheduled nor augmentation of our forces by a much greater amount holds great promise of bringing the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces visibly closer to collapse during the next 15 months … I suggest we examine our military operations in the South with a view to taking steps which will reduce our casualties and increase the role of the Vietnamese.”⁶³

LBJ was reportedly angered by McNamara’s initiative, complaining that his secretary of defense had gone “dovish” on him. On the memo, LBJ had written, “Chapter and verse—Why believe this?” In his memoirs, McNamara insisted that his critique of the war had done “one thing; it raised the tension between 2 men who loved and respected each other—Lyndon Johnson and me—to the breaking point.”⁶⁴In fact, there was little difference in the positions of the two men. McNamara was more ready to stop the bombing than his chief and more willing to recognize the NLF as an organization rather than a group of individuals, but on fundamentals the president and his defense chief were headed in the same direction: stabilization of the fighting at its present level, imposing a ceiling on the U.S. troop buildup, and doing everything possible to accelerate the Vietnamization of the war with the ultimate result of a negotiated settlement between the Ky-Thieu government and the NLF. McNamara’s departure was for personal and political reasons.

 

INTRUTH,Johnson and Westmoreland had been working on a plan for getting out of Vietnam since 1965. American units were introduced into combat not to assume responsibility for a strategic offensive against Hanoi. Rather, they were there to conduct three phases of warfare: to blunt the enemy’s conventional attack, clean out major communist bases and staging areas within South Vietnam, and finally push communist units out to South Vietnam’s border with Laos and Cambodia. Once those tasks were accomplished, South Vietnamese forces would carry the brunt of any continued combat with the Vietcong and American combat units could disengage. Westmoreland originally envisioned the completion of Phase III in late 1967, but was forced to push that forward by a year.⁶⁵Johnson’s goal was to avoid being forced out of Vietnam before Vietnamization could be implemented. The NVA and Vietcong could not accomplish that task, but the antiwar movement, especially dissent within the halls of power, could.

Using McNamara’s “alternative” as a foil, LBJ went through an elaborate procedure, calling the Wise Men together and consulting advisers past and present, including Fortas and Clifford, with the goal of shoring up his Vietnam consensus. All except Ball advised rejecting the McNamara approach. Acheson and company agreed that “there is great improvement and progress” evident in the conduct of the war. The United States should continue to bomb the north. Unilateral withdrawal from Vietnam was “unthinkable.”⁶⁶Fortas and Clifford were emphatic. “Our duty is to do what we consider right,” Fortas advised LBJ. The administration should persevere, including continuing to bomb the North, “unless and until the people through Congress or the polls make it impossible for the administration to do what it considers to be right in the national interest.”⁶⁷“The President and every man around him wants to end the war,” Clifford exclaimed. “But the future of our children and grandchildren require that it be ended by accomplishing our purpose, i.e., the thwarting of the aggression by North Vietnam, aided by China and Russia.”⁶⁸

In November 1967, LBJ once again recalled Westmoreland to buck up the home front. The commander of American troops in Vietnam made an appearance before the Armed Services Committees and then attended a Medal of Honor ceremony in the Rose Garden. That weekend, the Westmorelands and the Johnsons briefly escaped to Camp David. Richard Russell came down for dinner. He and the women present retired early, leaving the president and his field commander alone. LBJ broke the news that McNamara was leaving for the World Bank and that Clark Clifford was going to replace him. He then told Westmoreland that he did not plan to be a candidate in the 1968 presidential election and asked what the reaction of the troops would be. They would understand, the general replied. “President explained that his health was not good and that he and Lady Bird were tired,” Westmoreland subsequently recorded in his diary. “[He] recalled the fact that the constitution did not provide for an invalid president—a reference to the illness of Pres. Wilson and Pres. Eisenhower. The President emphasized the sensitivity of our discussion.”⁶⁹

LBJ, of course, had long been considering not running, but he had not made up his mind. Even a political naïf could see that the road to reelection in 1968 was going to be a rocky one. Bobby Kennedy was giving every sign that he was not going to wait until 1972. Egging him on was Arthur Schlesinger, who argued that there was a better than fifty-fifty chance that LBJ was going to escalate the bombing. “Psychologically he is a bully who has made his way in life by leaning on people,” Schlesinger wrote Kennedy, “and he recently has been extending the bully’s approach to Hanoi … He would probably count on the invasion generating a great surge of chauvinism, which would silence his critics, unite the country and perhaps carry him though 1968. I imagine he thinks that, the larger the conflict, the more families involved and therefore the more support for the war.”⁷⁰Both Kenny O’Donnell and Richard Goodwin delivered a series of speeches attacking LBJ’s record in the cities and Vietnam. Bobby made an emotional appearance onFace the Nation depicting the war in Vietnam as horrific and indefensible.⁷¹In Congress, figures like George McGovern in the Senate and Brock Adams in the House made no secret of their preference for RFK over LBJ. One of the White House’s allies, Congresswoman Julia Hansen of Washington, reported that Adams “is like a great number of Kennedy people who ‘deep down’ have a feeling of vengeance because President Kennedy was assassinated in President Johnson’s home state.”⁷²All the while, the Kennedys continued to glitter. “Saturday night we went to the big 17th Anniversary Bob Kennedy party,” Orville Freeman recorded in his diary. “We started at the Averell Harrimans for dinner and then out to Hickory Hill. It was a lavish and expensive party. The women in extreme gowns of various kinds, some in mini skirts to the long ones, fast music, lots of liquor and food, and all the ‘best’ people there.”⁷³

By the fall an organization calling itself Citizens for Kennedy÷Fulbright began soliciting pledges. Most outspoken of the dissidents was Allard Lowenstein, a thirty-eight-year-old New York attorney who seemed determined to merge the Democratic party with the New Left. In October he announced a conference for all those interested in dumping LBJ.⁷⁴But taking on an incumbent president, especially if that incumbent was Lyndon Johnson, was a daunting prospect, and Bobby refused to throw his hat in the ring. Desperate for a rallying point for the Stop LBJ movement, dissident Democrats persuaded Senator Eugene McCarthy, a Minnesota Democrat, to make himself available. Best known for his eloquent speech nominating Adlai Stevenson in 1960, McCarthy was described byNewsweek as “a scholarly, witty, somewhat lazy man who writes books, reads poetry and laces his lectures with dollops of theology.”⁷⁵He was not the only challenger.

It was clear that George Wallace was going to make another run at the presidential nomination as a Democrat. But Johnson’s advisers were divided as to whether the Wallace candidacy would hurt or help. If the Republicans nominated a neo-Goldwaterite like Governor Ronald Reagan of California, Wallace would drain away segregationist and superhawk votes in the South and the working-class neighborhoods of the North from the GOP, but if the Republicans nominated a moderate like Romney, the Wallace challenge would hurt.⁷⁶Finally, the administration was faced in 1967 with a minor farm revolt. Although net farm income per person had doubled between 1960 and 1965, it had dropped sharply between 1966 and 1967. Most of the decline was caused by skyrocketing prices for beef, the one commodity for which there was not a federal price support program. “The projection is that if elections were held next month we would lose every non-southern state with farm voter population of 9% or more,” one of Orville Freeman’s analysts advised him. “This would mean the loss of about 86 electoral college votes out of the 270 required.”⁷⁷

More than ever, LBJ’s personality had become an issue, “an issue, indeed, that seems increasingly to be producing almost as much criticism and contention as the war in Vietnam and the tumult in the ghettos,” observed one news magazine. In Pocatello, Idaho, a sixtyish grandmother and a life-long Democrat told an interviewer, “I’m beginning to hate that man!”⁷⁸Johnson’s staff had been acutely aware of the problem at least since the fall of 1966. With trepidation they had approached the president about making some changes. “The problem is that the press considers us humorless,” McPherson had observed to Moyers. “The press believes the President is unable to laugh at himself, and that his staff is too frightened to laugh at anything that goes on around the White House … We don’t go out to lunch; we don’t play touch football or softball; we just work.”⁷⁹Johnson was not going to be persuaded to take up touch football, but perhaps he could learn to modulate his mood swings, avoid absolutes, and stop indulging in public paroxysms of self-pity. As Journalist John Steele observed, “In this day of instantly seen television, his downs look like gravel pits, his ups like the stratosphere. He’s never had any real personal, emotional balance … When he gets emotional, he gets emotional all over the place.”⁸⁰

Johnson tried, and the press tried to respond. “Is It Superman? No, It’s LBJ,” ran aNewsweek headline in March 1967 on the new, more modest, more restrained chief executive.⁸¹In interviews with selected columnists and reporters Johnson attempted to appear self-effacing, satisfied, philosophical. “During my four years, on balance, I have had a good press,” he told Hugh Sidey. “I like the job. I am much more at ease and much less volatile,” he said when asked how he had changed. “We have one of the finest staffs we have ever had.” To Helen Thomas and Jack Horner: “When I was a little boy coming along, I thought I had been denied a lot of things other people had. But I can never cease to be grateful enough and thankful enough. I rarely ever have a pain … No man who ever lived had a better family … My job is excellent … I have a good cabinet … I have good care, good friends, good staff, good dogs, wonderful family. You have never heard me whine.”⁸²Things were tough in Vietnam but generally going well. “The common thing about them [American soldiers] is that all of them love the South Vietnamese,” he told Sidey with a straight face. “They go out at night to teach them, to care for their wounds, and to help in any way they can.”⁸³

The correspondents did not miss the anger, abuse, and self-pity. But at the same time, they felt insulted. LBJ’s new vanilla, I’m okay-you’re okay persona reeked of insincerity. In an effort to present a different, more modest, mellow image, he came off as being either patronizing or manipulative—or both. It also could not last. LBJ was incapable of hiding his feelings, of not striking out when he felt he was being treated unfairly, of not defending himself and his policies, of not unmasking those he felt guilty of hypocrisy. Why, Max Frankel asked during an interview in September, was such a strong figure like the president having trouble inspiring and moving people to his causes? He wasn’t the problem, Johnson replied defiantly. “The Republicans, factionalism of the Democratic party, the war in Vietnam, plus theNew York Times” were the problems. Liberals were married to Bobby’s ambition, “and they want to return to this house at the earliest possible hour.” If he was such a bad speaker, had no charisma, and was not a good campaigner, how had he managed to win so many elections? “Why do people dislike you?” Frankel asked. He replied, “I am a dominating personality, and when I get things done I don’t always please all the people … Remember people booed [baseball superstar] Ted Williams, too.” And don’t forget, “the protests are Communist led.”⁸⁴

Despite all this doubt and turmoil, LBJ still believed he could win. Liberals—doves, hawks, farmers, labor unionists, intellectuals, environmentalists, blacks—might be dissatisfied, but where were they going to turn? If they embraced Bobby or McCarthy, the Democratic party would lose the South and the election. He was still the only Democrat who could win, and he would capture the nomination if he decided to pursue it. A Quayle poll, taken the last week in November, showed that Democrats preferred LBJ to RFK by 47 percent to 36 percent, with 11 percent undecided. A Harris survey showed an LBJ-HHH ticket leading Romney-Reagan by 57 percent to 43 percent.⁸⁵In November LBJ briefly hit the campaign trail, and delivered a series of speeches lauding the accomplishments of the Great Society and the bravery of America’s fighting men. At a White House press conference, he lambasted the Vietnam naysayers in Congress. To a prounion crowd he called for passage of the tax surcharge. In a ceremony swearing in newly elected members of the Washington, D.C., City Council, he declared war on “crime in the streets.” He lambasted the GOP for its social irresponsibility. “Some have called the passage of this act [an appropriations bill for HUD] a legislative victory,” he remarked at the signing ceremony. “It might better be called a legislative miracle.” “Ninety-three percent of the House Republicans voted to recommit and kill rent supplements. Eighty percent voted to … delete all funds for model cities.”⁸⁶In December he flew to Bar Harbor, Florida, to address the twelve hundred delegates to the AFL-CIO Convention, which had just voted to endorse him.

During this flurry, he gave what by all accounts was the best press conference of his presidency. Armed once again with a lavalier microphone clipped to his lapel, he stepped out from behind the podium and delivered a thirty-seven-minute, stem-winding defense of his policies. He was funny, inspiring, expressive, engaging. LBJ had at last “showed the nation the compelling, free-swinging form he usually reserves for private persuasion,”Newsweek exulted.⁸⁷“When I came away from the White House I felt good inside for the first time in too long,” Hugh Sidey wrote Johnson after the conference. “I suddenly sensed just how much I want to you to succeed and just how much better I feel when things go well for the President of the United States.” Johnson was warmed. “Thanks much for the time it took to write me and the heart that produced the understanding and encouragement,” he wrote back.⁸⁸

Part of Johnson’s image problem was that in terms of popular culture, he hailed from the wrong side of the tracks. During the 1960s it seemed that half of middle-class white America listened to the Beatles, danced the frug, and went to James Bond movies, while the other half watched westerns, listened to Tony Orlando and Tony Bennett, and bowled. Lyndon Johnson definitely fell into the latter category.⁸⁹“Lyndon Johnson roamed the country in a green suit … in the age of muted gray,” Hugh Sidey wrote. “He was an avuncular figure who eschewed the seashore when the ads beckoned all America to seek the sand and surf. He had never skied in his life, and he hunted from the airconditioned interior of a white Lincoln Continental. His golf was poor. Amid the great crush of culture, he knew neither Beatles nor Brahms. His artist was Norman Rockwell.”⁹⁰In planning for the 1968 campaign, George Reedy, back again at the White House on a temporary basis, suggested putting together “one of those electric guitar ‘musical’ groups to travel around to meetings. It is not too difficult to get some kids with long hair and fancy clothes and give them a title such as ‘The Black Beards’ or ‘The White Beards’ and turn them loose.” Johnson was intrigued. “This may deserve attention,” he scrawled on Reedy’s memo.⁹¹

The counterculture, the youth movement, cultural change, and rebelliousness in general confused and upset Johnson. One staffer remembered his angrily denouncing the assumptions that underlay the movieThe Graduate , after watching it in the converted hangar at the ranch. “When he was a young man, a college education was a tremendous prize,” George Reedy observed. In the world of the 1960s it was viewed as more of an entitlement by many middle-class white Americans. “Second, their lifestyle was totally different from his lifestyle as a young man. When he was a young man, as soon as you graduated from college you were very careful to comb your hair right and tie your tie right, get a pressed shirt, pressed suit, and you’d start making the rounds looking for a job … The long hair bothered him, the careless, sloppy clothing, the blue jeans, and he’d look around the White House and he’d see a lot of young people that looked exactly like his ideal … And so to him that was the real American youth. I don’t know where he thought those people outside came from, probably Mars or Neptune.”⁹²

Entertainment at White House social functions usually featured light-hearted song and dance: Victor Borge, the wisecracking pianist, for example. Lyndon and Lady Bird were particularly enamored of Carol Channing. On the fourth anniversary of her Broadway hitHello Dolly! there was a celebration at the executive mansion. She and the cast performed thirty minutes from Act II that featured the line “Money is like manure. It doesn’t do any good unless it is spread around.” The presidential couple, the vice president and Muriel Humphrey, the chief justice, and other honored guests were delighted. Afterward, they danced. There was always dancing at any Johnson White House function. “Lyndon led Carol out on the floor,” as Lady Bird described the scene. “Her feathered hat covered his face as they danced. Rather than join in, nearly everybody made a circle and watched.”⁹³

Johnson continued to take sustenance, spiritual and physical, from the adoring women who surrounded him. Juanita Roberts, his personal secretary, wrote him the morning after a Victor Borge concert at the White House: “I want to thank you for the lovely colored picture and for the very sweet inscription. You were so very, very generous on my birthday, my emotion tonguetied me. The picture will keep those wondrous moments alive for me always.”⁹⁴Rumors of a romantic relationship with Jewell Malechek, wife of his ranch foreman, were already rampant around Johnson City.⁹⁵In part, his relationships—which at this point in his life were almost certainly not sexual—were a function of the LBJ persona, and in part they were a result of feelings of loneliness and isolation. Lyndon and Lady Bird found themselves apart more and more as their rounds of official duties took them in separate directions. Yet he seemed, emotionally and psychologically, more dependent on her than ever. “Sometime during the evening Lyndon called, and I could sense the loneliness in his voice and the desire just to talk to me,” Lady Bird wrote in her diary in mid-August. “I try to keep that loneliness at bay and I felt torn between doing what I was doing, which must be done, and being with him. The ‘Mary’ and the ‘Martha’ in my life have an eternal war.”⁹⁶

Both Lyndon and Lady Bird were feeling vulnerable about themselves and about each other. That same month, Lady Bird was scheduled to return to Washington from New York, where she had been on a shopping trip. The weather was bad and the pilot came on to announce that they would have to sit on the runway for a while until the storms let up. Suddenly Lady Bird’s security men whisked her off the plane. The LaGuardia tower had received an anonymous telephone call threatening to blow up the five o’clock shuttle.⁹⁷A month later, at the ranch, LBJ spent all one day talking with John Connally, who had announced that he was not going to run again for the governorship, and Jake Pickle, then a U.S. congressman. The subject was retirement. The three men started off the morning by riding horseback around the wooded ridges and pastures, analyzing the pros and cons. “He was blowing hot and cold on his decision,” Pickle recalled. Connally could not see his patron-rival putting himself through another four years. Peace demonstrators around the White House were now so thick and constant that a presidential foray into the world outside had become a major ordeal. Pickle, on the other hand, could not see Johnson giving way to Bobby Kennedy. Around seven that evening Lyndon summoned Lady Bird to join the discussion. With her hair still in rollers she joined the three men for dinner on TV trays. She was unequivocal in her opposition to another term. She reminded her husband that his father had died at sixty. Like Lyndon, Lady Bird feared a debilitating illness while they still occupied the White House. She brought a laugh when she quipped, “If we ever get sick, I want to be sick on our time.”⁹⁸The following month, family physician Willis Hurst called the first lady and told her that he was worried about the president’s health. She asked him straight up if he was fit enough for another term. Hurst did not answer, but he suggested that she do two things: limit her travel schedule in order to be close to Lyndon’s side and have a physical to assure that the strain of her position was not ruining her own health. That night she had another long talk with her husband about retirement. “Our mood was bleak and dispirited and no answers came,” she remembered.⁹⁹

In mid-December, Lynda Bird and Chuck Robb were married in the East Room of the White House in an Episcopal ceremony. Five hundred guests, including eighty-three-year-old Alice Roosevelt Longworth, moved through the receiving line in the Blue Room. The president seemed in good spirits, if a bit fatigued. Carol Channing again created a stir in an outfit of yellow mini-bloomers and yellow stockings. The newlyweds would have only two months of married life together in their rented split-level house in Arlington before Chuck reported for a year of active duty in Vietnam. “I’m a professional military man,” he reminded reporters.¹⁰⁰Before he left, Robb turned over a written statement to Liz Carpenter to be released if he were captured or killed. “I believe in what we’re doing in Vietnam,” he told Lady Bird’s chief of staff. “If the enemy should try to broadcast some phony statement or claim, you and the Pentagon know my views and can release them.”¹⁰¹