Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (88 page)

The final complaint about Johnson—that he oversold the Great Society—is both true and understandable. This is what political leaders do in order to make legislators and voters buy what they create. Johnson, a master salesman, could not restrain himself, especially when he had the now ubiquitous appliance of television to help him. Selling, often with grandiloquent flourishes, was part of the American way, not only of politics but also of the lusty commercial civilization of which it was a part.

Still, the overselling proved unfortunate for Johnson and for American liberalism. What it did was greatly strengthen powerful attitudes, notably the rise of grand expectations, that had been gathering force since the 1950s and that were starting to dominate the culture in the early 1960s. The overselling further propelled popular feelings that the United States could have it all and do it all—that there were no limits to how comfortable and powerful and healthy and happy Americans could be. This infectious optimism—about expertise, about government, about "entitlements"—stimulated a Rights Revolution that reverberated long afterwards. But the optimists were low on humility, and they underestimated the formidable divisions—of race, of class, of region, of gender—that persisted in the United States. The liberal faith of LBJ and others in the 1960s was both attractive and well-meaning, but it was destined for serious trouble ahead.

20
Escalation in Vietnam

Like many Texans of his generation, Lyndon Johnson was brought up on the story of the Alamo, where brave men had fought to the death to resist attack. As President he told people that his great-great-grandfather had died there, although there was no substance to his claim. Vietnam, he exclaimed to advisers on the National Security Council, "is just like the Alamo."
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This is one of many anecdotes that critics of LBJ relate about his approach to foreign policy. They portray him as ignorant about the world, imperious, devious in the extreme, and quick on the trigger. His handling of the war in Vietnam, they emphasize, demonstrated all these traits. When he sat down with Ambassador Lodge in the immediate aftermath of Kennedy's assassination, he personalized the war. "I am not going to lose Vietnam," he said. "I am not going to be the President who saw Southeast Asia go the way China went."
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For many Americans then and later the struggle in Vietnam was simply "Johnson's War."
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While Johnson was more sophisticated about foreign policy than these anecdotes suggest, there was no doubt that United States involvement in Vietnam escalated enormously under his watch. At the end of 1963 roughly 17,000 American military "advisers" were stationed in Vietnam. A year later there were 23,000. Huge escalation then ensued. Following an attack on an American base in February 1965, United States planes began bombing North Vietnam. By late March American marines were regularly engaged in combat. At the end of 1965 there were 184,000 American military personnel in Vietnam; by the end of 1966, 450,000; by early 1968, more than 500,000. The number of American casualties (killed, wounded, hospitalized, and missing) increased from 2,500 in 1965 to a cumulative total of 33,000 by the end of 1966, to 80,000 by the end of 1967, and to 130,000 by the end of 1968, the peak of American involvement.
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American planes unleashed more bombs, many of them napalm, on Vietnam between 1965 and the end of 1967 than they had in all theaters of World War II.
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Toxic chemical defoliants such as Agent Orange, dropped to eradicate enemy cover, hit millions of acres of land in Vietnam and destroyed one-half of the timberlands in the South.
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A motto of bombing crews read "Only You Can Prevent Forests."

By the beginning of 1968 American and South Vietnamese firepower had killed, according to reasonably reliable estimates, some 220,000 enemy soldiers. This was some sixteen times the number of Americans (13,500) slain in Vietnam during the same period.
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Civilian casualties, although smaller as a percentage of total casualties than in the Korean War (where percentages had hit record highs), were also numerous.
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It is estimated that approximately 415,000 civilians were killed during the ten years of American involvement in the war.
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Roughly one-third of the people of South Vietnam fled their homes as refugees at one time or another during these years.
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The escalation did not deter the enemy. By mid-1964 the North Vietnamese under Ho Chi Minh and his chief general, Vo Nguyen Giap, had assumed control of most military operations in the South, thereby transforming the character of the war. They relied in part on guerrilla tactics, many of them conducted by southern allies in the National Liberation Front, and increasingly as of late 1965 on conventional pitched battles in which the North Vietnamese army ordinarily had a substantial edge in manpower.
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These engagements, as casualty figures indicated, cost them dearly: they lost approximately a million troops during the war. The United States enjoyed an enormous edge in firepower, it controlled the air, and its soldiers—contrary to later accusations of ineptitude—fought well, especially before 1969. American soldiers won the majority of such battles. But Ho Chi Minh's losses were far from fatal. North Vietnam had a rapidly growing population, which in 1965 totaled around 19 million people (as opposed to 16 million in the South), and some 200,000 young men came of fighting age each year during the war. As many as were needed were thrown into the effort. The North also received substantial military aid from both the Soviet Union and China (some $2 billion between 1965 and 1968), but they relied above all on themselves and on the NLF in the South.
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Ho Chi Minh ran a dictatorial system that he employed ruthlessly to outlast the imperialist invaders, from the world's most powerful country, and to demand nothing less than an outcome that would ultimately unite Vietnam under his control. More than any other factor, the unyielding determination of the enemy, both from the North and from Ho's supporters in the South, wore down the American commitment, which proved to be far less resolute, and foiled Johnson's efforts.

This was the longest and ultimately the most unpopular war in United States history. It had large and negative effects on American life. While it lasted the war directed vast new resources to the military-industrial complex. It further escalated the arms race and diverted the attention of Johnson and the American people from foreign problems elsewhere in the world. (The Soviet Union, building frantically, approached nuclear parity with the United States during these years.) It "Americanized" and corrupted the culture and society of South Vietnam.
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It unnerved and at times alienated America's allies. Spending for the war created huge budgetary deficits and contributed significantly to inflation and economic instability by the early 1970s. These economic problems, worsening in the early 1970s, seriously threatened the grand expectations that had accompanied the liberal surge of the early and mid-1960s.
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The war helped undo Johnson's hopes for congressional expansion of Great Society programs. He understood that it would, which is one of the reasons why he put off major escalation until February 1965 and why he tried for the next few months to hide the extent of American involvement from Congress and the American people. "I knew from the start," he said later, "that I was bound to be crucified either way I moved. If I left the woman I really loved—the Great Society—in order to get involved with that bitch of a war on the other side of the world, then I would lose everything at home. All my programs. All my hopes to feed the hungry and feed the homeless. All my dreams."
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Still, he chose the bitch. He soon found himself dealing with military matters day and night and forsaking the domestic causes that had been closest to his heart. Care and dollars that might have gone to the Great Society were lavished on the most awesome military machine in world history.

Above all, the war polarized American society. Contrary to some accounts, substantial opposition to the war rose only slowly in the United States, and it failed before 1968 to deter Johnson and his advisers from their course. But as early as the spring of 1965 professors and students on college campuses staged "teach-ins" critical of the war. New Left organizations, small before 1965, attracted increased support and staged well-publicized anti-war demonstrations. Senator William Fulbright, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, held televised hearings critical of the war in January 1966. To pacify critics such as these Johnson and his aides spoke of their desire for peace and promised vast American economic aid to Southeast Asia when the fighting stopped. In early 1966 he talked grandiloquently of "turning the Mekong into a Tennessee Valley."
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But LBJ refused to agree to anything that might cause South Vietnam to fall to Communism. Rhetoric aside, Johnson departed only sporadically and slightly from this central position, which echoed those of Eisenhower and Kennedy, and he attempted no serious negotiations with the enemy—which was also inflexible—during his presidency. To offer concessions to Communists from Vietnam, he said contemptuously, was to succumb to "Nobel Prize fever."
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Escalation increasingly dominated his term of office. Draft calls rose rapidly after 1964, unsettling the large number of American males of the baby boom generation. A total of 11.7 million Americans served in the armed services during the nearly ten years of heavy American involvement in the war, 2.1 million of whom went to Vietnam and 1.6 million of whom saw combat.
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This was a small minority of the 26.8 million men who came of draft age (18 through 25) during the war; unlike the World War II or Korean War generations, the majority of draft-age Americans neither entered the military nor fought.
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But millions of young men after 1964 could not be sure of their fate, especially in the Johnson years, when calls were highest. These peaked in 1966, when 340,000 Americans were drafted, compared to an average of only 100,000 per year between 1960 and 1964. An average of 300,000 a year were drafted in the years 1965–1968. Four times as many other young men enlisted in order to put an end to the mounting uncertainty posed by their draft boards or to secure assignments that minimized their chances of combat. By 1968, one-third of 20-year-old men in the United States were in the service.
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The enemy persevered, confident that the United States would lose heart. Johnson responded by escalating American involvment. The United States bombed and bombed and bombed, obliterating villages and uprooting millions. American soldiers fought in jungles, forests, rice paddies, and hundreds of villages. But it was an unusually bewildering war without a clearly demarcated battle front. Defense Secretary McNamara and General William Westmoreland, America's new commander in Vietnam, bragged instead about enemy "body counts." Their goal consisted of killing the Vietcong ("VC") in large numbers, thereby depleting the enemy of fighting men and turning the tide. Many South Vietnamese people, moreover, seemed maddeningly indifferent or, worse, friendly with the NLF. It seemed to the bewildered and frustrated Americans that no one could be trusted. People on both sides committed atrocities. Casualties mounted, gradually intensifying domestic opposition to the war.
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Even early in the fighting it seemed that the bloodshed would never end.

The Vietnam War ultimately enlarged widespread doubts about the capacity—indeed the honesty—of government leaders. Sapping the optimism that had energized liberals in the early 1960s, it badly damaged the Democratic party and provoked contentiousness that sharpened already significant class and racial grievances. It called into question the honor and the decency of much that Americans claimed to stand for. Nothing did more than the conflict in Vietnam to alter the course of post-World War II American society and politics or to unleash the emotions that polarized the nation after 1965.

J
OHNSON DID NOT ESCALATE
the war because he was temperamentally a warmonger. Unlike Kennedy, he had never demonstrated much interest in foreign policy or in the glamor of Special Forces, Green Berets, or "flexible response." Cloak-and-dagger intrigue did not appeal to him. When he heard in November 1963 about secret American efforts to sabotage Cuban installations, he ordered them stopped, even though the CIA informed him that Castro was promoting a coup in Venezuela.
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LBJ also sought to pursue the uneasy detente that Kennedy and Khrushchev had been developing in late 1963. Throughout his administration he took great care not to make sudden moves that might provoke either the Soviet Union or China, which remained at loggerheads.

LBJ's policy of escalation in Vietnam, moreover, was neither careless nor precipitous. Contrary to some historical accounts, the United States did not get bogged down in a "quagmire" because Johnson waded into a swamp without looking where he was going. Johnson and his top advisers, to be sure, did not understand the resolve and resourcefulness of Communist revolutionaries, and they never imagined the morass that ultimately swallowed the American effort. But he was well aware of the political and military deterioriation afflicting the government of the South in 1964. By mid-year enemy forces controlled 40 percent of the land and 50 percent of the people in South Vietnam. The so-called Ho Chi Minh Trail, an elaborate network of roads (some of them in Cambodia and Laos) facilitating infiltration from the North, could handle trucks and other heavy equipment.
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Johnson, deciding whether to escalate, had solid intelligence on these developments. Moreover, a few of his advisers, including Undersecretary of State George Ball and Maxwell Taylor (whom Johnson named to replace Lodge as ambassador) warned him in 1964 and early 1965 that large-scale engagement of American troops was unlikely to accomplish much. So did informal advisers such as Senate Democratic leader Mike Mansfield. CIA officials (to whom Johnson paid little attention) said much the same, as they had since 1961.
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Unlike Kennedy, who until mid-1963 had given the situation in Vietnam little attention, Johnson understood that it demanded constant consideration and that escalation of American involvement carried with it imposing dangers. For this reason—and because he wanted nothing to disrupt his chances for election in 1964—Johnson increased American aid to South Vietnam but otherwise said little concerning the conflict during his first fourteen months in office.

Still, Johnson's personal approach to policy-making did much to promote escalation. As his comments to Lodge in November 1963 revealed, LBJ perceived Vietnam, like civil rights, as a litmus test of his ability to carry on the policies, as he saw them, of his martyred predecessor.
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Kennedy's support of the coup against Diem, he thought, committed the United States to the preservation of successive governments in South Vietnam. From the start LBJ worked hard to retain Kennedy's foreign policy and defense team, succeeding in persuading McNamara, Rusk, and National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy to stay on. All became top advisers on Vietnam, Rusk for the remainder of his administration. Holding firm in Vietnam would not only carry on Kennedy's policies; it would also show that Johnson could be counted on to sustain the international credibility of the United States. This, he thought, was vital. He told Lodge, "Go back and tell those generals in Saigon that Lyndon Johnson intends to stand by our word."
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