The Passage of Power (111 page)

Ed Clark understood why. The beeper was summoning Kellam to talk to the President, and the talk was to be conducted in privacy.

Another locale being linked that Christmas to the White House was the Johnson City office of the law firm of
Moursund & Ferguson. The telephones on the desks of the two partners were replaced by new ones—with an added button; it
“wasn’t
labeled anything, but when you pushed that, you got the White House’s board in Washington,” says Moursund’s partner,
Thomas C. Ferguson, an influential Hill Country politician, former district judge and chairman of the
Texas State Board of Insurance. And while Moursund would maintain, over and over, during the entire Johnson presidency, that no business was discussed over those office lines, that is not what Ferguson says. When the author asked him whether Johnson conducted personal business over those lines, Ferguson replied, “Oh, yeah. He and Moursund were talking every day.… You see, Moursund was trustee of all his property: one of these blind trusts—it wasn’t very blind.” The author asked Ferguson if he himself had conducted business for Johnson during his presidency. “Myself? Oh, yes,” Ferguson replied, and provided the details of several such transactions.

Other lines were installed—in the law firm of
Clark, Thomas, Harris, Denius & Winters in Austin: one on Ed Clark’s desk, one on
Donald Thomas’; in
Earl Deathe’s office down the hall from Kellam’s at KTBC. Another was placed in Deathe’s home. By the conclusion of the Christmas trip, the phones were all in.

Calls were not restricted to office hours. Johnson wanted to be able to make calls to these men not only from the Oval Office but from his living quarters in the White House, and he didn’t want those calls to go through the White House switchboard.
“I
want an outside phone [line] installed in my bedroom … like that other one, where I don’t have to go through any operator,” he told
Walter Jenkins not long after his return from Texas. “Can I do that? … I’d like to make a private call. When I talk to A. W. Moursund, when I talk to any of them, I don’t like the …” He
could
do that. Whatever it was he didn’t like—perhaps the fact that a log is kept of all calls to and from a President that go through the White House switchboard, perhaps the chance that an operator might listen in on the call (the recording becomes too garbled at this point to understand his next words)—was promptly changed. The outside line was installed, and after it was,
Marie Fehmer says, “We could not know the calls he had placed from the
bedroom.” White House phone logs and operators would have no record of them.

There would be a lot of such calls. “Every night he told Moursund what to do,” Ferguson told the author. “A lot of [it] was Johnson saying to Moursund, ‘Well, I want to do this,’ ‘I want to do that’—‘I want to get this piece of land,’ ‘I want to stock [with cattle] certain places.…’ And of course at that time anything Moursund said stood up throughout the Johnson properties … and he would carry out what the President would tell him he wanted done.… It was a very unblind trust as far as that trust was concerned.” Moursund would arrive at the law firm office the next morning with instructions that Johnson had given him in calls to his home the previous evening. Often, he would tell Ferguson, Johnson had been lying in bed in the White House when he called. Earl Deathe also speaks of late-night—and some early-morning—calls from the White House. “Sometimes he’d call you three or four o’clock in the morning,” he says. After these lines were installed, Clark says, Johnson wanted his dealings about his business interests conducted over these direct phone lines.

All during Lyndon Johnson’s presidency, he, either himself or through a press secretary, would insist that he had divorced himself completely from his business interests. “As the American people know,”
George Reedy said in one of many such statements—all approved word for word by the President—“the President has devoted all his time and energy to the public business and he is not engaged in any private enterprise, directly or indirectly.” And all during his presidency, the phones stayed in place, and the calls went on.

T
HERE WAS DECEPTION
and secrecy during that Christmas trip in not only personal affairs but governmental.

If Vietnam initially seemed to him to be a part of the “breathing space” he had been provided on foreign affairs, the only immediate decisions necessary the ones he had made in his
NSAM 273 of November 26, he had been quickly disabused of that impression. Within days, he was reading new reports: that the military situation, particularly in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta, was
“deteriorating
,” and that the new junta was disorganized. One report, from Lodge, said that in a key province,
“The
past thirty days have produced … a day-by-day increase in Viet Cong influence, military operations, physical control of the countryside.”

The earlier reports, Johnson would say in his memoirs, using phrases that to him were particularly damning, were
“wishful
thinking”: “We had been misled into over-optimism.” He dispatched McNamara, along with McCone and Assistant Secretary of Defense
William P. Bundy (McGeorge’s brother), to Vietnam, giving McNamara
“quite
a lecture” expressing “concern that we as a government were not doing everything we should,” and the Defense secretary’s report, delivered on his return to Washington, on December 21, said that
“the
situation is very disturbing. Current trends, unless reversed in the next 2–3 months, will lead to
neutralization at best and most likely to a Communist-controlled state.… We should watch the situation very carefully, running scared, hoping for the best, but preparing for more forceful moves if the situation does not show early signs of improvement.”

McCone, in a brief report of his own, said he felt
“a
little less pessimistic [than McNamara],” but to Johnson the time for “less” pessimism, for “wishful thinking” in any form, was over. His views had been hardening—or perhaps only becoming more apparent. Strong as were the militant voices in Congress, there were voices on the other side, too—but the new President wasn’t listening to them. Ill equipped though
Mike Mansfield was to be Majority Leader, he was well qualified indeed to give advice on Vietnam, having been not only a professor of East Asian history but one with a thoughtful overview of that part of the world, and on December 7 he had given Johnson a memo saying continuation of the war there would be costly to America and urging less reliance on a military solution in Vietnam and more on a political. Johnson’s response, in a conversation with Mansfield’s aide
Francis R. Valeo, secretary of the Senate, on the evening of December 23, the day before he left for Texas, was to ask for another memo from Mansfield, and he made the request in words that made clear the advice he wanted. “What are we going to do about Vietnam?” he said. “We’re going to lose that war. Do you want that to be another China? … Get me a memo on it.… I don’t want these people around the world worrying about us, and they are.… They’re worried about whether you’ve got a weak President or a strong President.” And when Mansfield didn’t take the hint, saying in his second memo, “As you remarked to [Valeo] on the telephone, we do not want another China in Vietnam,” but “neither do we want another Korea.… A key factor in both situations was a tendency to bite off more than we were prepared in the end to chew.… We are close to the point of no return in Vietnam,” Johnson’s response would be to solicit memoranda from McNamara, Rusk and Bundy to counter Mansfield’s arguments.
“The
stakes in preserving an anti-Communist South Vietnam are so high that in our judgment, we must go on bending every effort to win,” McNamara’s said. Rusk arrived at the ranch with a memo that he handed to Johnson in which he wrote that there was need for a presidential statement emphasizing “the urgency of action to reverse the adverse trend in the war as well as reaffirming the United States policy of complete support for the Vietnamese government.” And included in the President’s response to McNamara’s “disturbing” report was approval of two of its recommendations: that more United States advisers be sent from Saigon to the Mekong Delta and other embattled provinces; and that an interdepartmental committee, chaired by Marine Lieutenant General Victor H. “Brute” Krulak, be created to study OPLAN 34-A, the proposal for covert military operations against North Vietnam, and to designate those operations with the “least risk” and the most “plausibility of denial.” The Krulak committee’s report, which called for
“progressively
escalating pressure … to inflict increasing punishment upon North Vietnam,” arrived at the Johnson Ranch on
January 2. Among the operations it recommended, all to be carried out during the next twelve months, were guerrilla raids against the
Ho Chi Minh Trail, “hit-and-run” commando raids along the North Vietnamese coasts—and shelling by American warships of North Vietnamese military installations on the coast of the
Gulf of Tonkin.
“There’s
one of three things you can do” about Vietnam, the President would soon be saying in a telephone call from the ranch to
John Knight of Knight Ridder newspapers, a supporter who nonetheless felt the United States might be “over-committed” in Vietnam. “One is run and let the dominoes start falling over. And God almighty, what they said about us leaving
China would just be warming up compared to what they’d say now.… You can run, or you can fight, as we are doing, or you can sit down and agree to neutralize all of it. But nobody is going to neutralize North Vietnam, so that’s totally impractical. And so it really boils down to one of two decisions—getting out or getting in.… But we can’t abandon it to them, as I see it.”

The great questions about the Vietnam War—including the questions of whether Lyndon Johnson had feasible choices other than the ones he spelled out in that telephone call; of whether it is true, as one of his biographers says, that
“no
President, especially an unproven, unelected one, could simply have withdrawn without some real hope that the South Vietnamese could have held off a
Viet Cong–North Vietnamese takeover”; of whether, if other feasible options existed, Johnson pursued them with sincerity; and of whether, had John F. Kennedy lived, United States policy would have been different from the policy Johnson pursued—these questions are among those that must remain to be examined in the next volume of this work. However, two aspects of the early decisions on Vietnam, early steps on what was to be a very long road, that Johnson took during that Christmas vacation on the ranch, are clear: first, whatever steps he took during that vacation, he took as well steps to conceal them, to keep them secret from Congress and the American people; and, second, the steps he took had, as their unifying principle, an objective dictated largely by domestic—indeed, personal—political concerns.

By the time McNamara had completed his trip to Vietnam,
“it
was clear” that “the plan for withdrawing U.S. forces was no longer workable,” says
William C. Gibbons, author of a definitive study of Vietnam policy-making, but no announcement was made that the plan—the first stage of which was the withdrawal of a thousand troops “by the end of the year”—was not being carried out. Instead, there was, in Gibbons’ phrase,
“juggling
the figures.”

Every month, more than a thousand soldiers routinely left Vietnam as part of regular troop rotations, to be replaced by an equal number of new soldiers. During the first part of December, the rotation schedule had been on a pace to achieve the thousand-man reduction, but following McNamara’s trip, while the rotation out of Vietnam was continued, “the replacement pipeline was slowed somewhat.” The departure of the troops originally scheduled to be sent to Vietnam in the last weeks of December was delayed. They were simply sent in January
and February instead.
“In
the last weeks of 1963 … plans for phased withdrawal of 1,000 advisers by end-year 1963 went through the motions by concentrating rotations home in December and letting strength rebound in the subsequent two months,” the
Pentagon Papers
explained. At the end of the year, the number of United States military personnel in
Vietnam was 15,914, a number which, as the
Pentagon Papers
noted, “did not even represent a decline of 1,000 from the peak of 16,732,” being, in fact, only 818 lower. Even the 818 figure was illusory. As soon as the year ended, the replacement pipeline was speeded up, and within a matter of weeks, troop strength was back at its peak level, so that there was in fact no reduction at all. December’s “planned 1,000-man reduction [therefore] proved essentially an accounting exercise,” the
Pentagon Papers
explained.

But Johnson was to announce that the plan had been carried out.
“We
have called back approximately 1,000 people,” he said in a press conference on March 7, 1964.

In another development, the “more forceful moves” for which McNamara had said the Administration should be “preparing” were indeed being prepared. The Krulak committee’s report, which had arrived at the ranch on January 2, would not be formally approved by the President until January 16, but the covert operations it authorized—including the ones around the Gulf of Tonkin—were to begin on February 1. The approval of the plan—in effect, an escalation of the war, although a minor one—was never announced to the public or revealed to Congress (although a few members may have been quietly advised of some of the details). A National Security Action Memorandum would have normally been signed by the President as a result of the approval. No such memorandum was ever signed.

The overriding aim of the withdrawal and covert operations decisions—and of other decisions about Vietnam during the early days of Lyndon Johnson’s presidency—was to keep Vietnam from becoming a major political issue,
“above
all else,” as
Fredrik Logevall put it in
Choosing War,
a detailed study of American decision-making from 1963 through 1965, “to keep Vietnam from complicating his election-year strategy.… The president judged all options on the war in terms of what they meant for November.” So close to his vest was Johnson holding his cards on Vietnam that even McGeorge Bundy, who was carrying out his strategy, wasn’t sure what it was. When, on March 2, 1964, the national security advisor was driven to ask him,
“What
is your own internal thinking on this [the overall Vietnam situation], Mr. President?,” Johnson gave him his clearest answer yet. “I just can’t believe that we can’t take 15,000 [
sic
] advisers and 200,000 people [South Vietnamese troops] and maintain the
status quo
for six months. I just believe we can do that, if we do it right.” Six months might have been a minor miscalculation. Election Day, 1964—November 3—was not six months away, but eight. But it might not have been. The Democratic National Convention would begin on August 24, in slightly less than six months. Sitting President though he
was, there was Bobby Kennedy to consider. Miscalculation or not, however, the President’s aim was clear: the maintenance of the
status quo
until a date set by a political calendar.