The Wars of Watergate (5 page)

In retrospect, Johnson complained that “that bitch of a war” took him away from “the woman I really loved”—his Great Society. The war ruptured the nation, sparking unprecedented anger and resistance to government policies. The President and his advisers, however, stuck to their chosen position, determined to justify the conflict as a defense of the national interest. In the end, however, both success abroad and consensus at home eluded them. Demoralized, even a bit bewildered, Johnson said in 1968 that the only difference between Kennedy’s assassination and his was that he was “alive and it has been more torturous.” The war “cut the arteries of the LBJ administration,” wrote a sympathetic aide. It nearly cut the nation’s as well.
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Johnson struggled to preserve his relationship with “the woman he loved,” despite the incessant demands of his “bitch.” During his last years in office, with inflation soaring nearly out of control, and with the budget deficit at a then-astronomical $25 billion, he finally accepted some restraints on Great Society spending in exchange for a tax surcharge. Valiantly—and successfully—he
struggled for a new civil rights bill that among other things prohibited discrimination in the sale and rental of housing.
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But despite that success, the drive for the Great Society was over. The pressures for a wider, more expensive war prevailed after 1965. Curiously, the counterpressures for peace only accelerated the war effort as the President desperately tried to bring Hanoi to the peace table.

The decision to commit American forces in the Vietnam war, and the subsequent conduct of the war, remain controversial. But the passage of time has not eroded contemporary judgments of friend and foe alike that Lyndon Johnson failed miserably to exercise his vaunted leadership and political skills. He failed to tell the nation that sacrifice was inevitable; he failed to prepare the nation for the protracted war that flowed from his limited pursuit of war aims; more significantly, he failed to inform the nation why it was at war. He committed American men and arms, but he failed to commit the American people to that war.

And he knew better. Clark Clifford, one of the few men Johnson held in awe, warned in July 1965 that the war was futile. “I don’t believe we can win in South Vietnam,” he said. “If we send in 100,000 more men, the North Vietnamese will meet us. If North Vietnam runs out of men, the Chinese will send in volunteers. Russia and China don’t intend for us to win the war.” Clifford urged that we get out “honorably.” Otherwise, he warned, “I can’t see anything but catastrophe for my country.”

However valued Clifford may have been, the President soon made it clear that opposition to his policies was a luxury at home and a boon to the enemy. He was sure, he said, that our soldiers did not “think we should enjoy the luxury of fighting each other back home.” But most of all, he heaped scorn on his critics and blithely appealed to patriotic abstractions. “There will be some Nervous Nellies and some who will become frustrated and break ranks under the strain,” the President remarked. There would be those who would “turn on their leaders and on their country and on our fighting men. There will be times of trial and tensions in the days ahead that will exact the best that is in all of us.”
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Johnson’s patriotic homilies were inadequate. George Washington, at Valley Forge in 1778, warned that whoever built upon patriotism as a sufficient basis for conducting a long and bloody war “will find themselves deceived in the end.” Such a war, Washington insisted, could never be sustained by patriotism alone. “It must be aided by a prospect of Interest or some reward. For a time, it may, of itself push Men to action;… but it will not endure unassisted by Interest.” Nevertheless, Johnson and his advisers “wrapped themselves in the flag,” decrying the “Nervous Nellies” who opposed the war. Deception and self-delusion alike pervaded the Johnson Administration’s conduct of the war.

Vietnam was not prominent in the first months of the Johnson Administration.
The problem still fit into the pattern of continuity with the Kennedy policies. In a telephone conversation on March 2, 1964, Johnson told Senator Fulbright that he would follow Kennedy’s course, and the Senator enthusiastically concurred. If Johnson had any doubts, certainly Fulbright allayed them. The Senate’s foremost foreign-policy spokesman rejected any proposals for negotiations with the North until the American and South Vietnamese bargaining positions had been strengthened. Whether the United States chose to expand the conflict “one way or another,” or confined itself to bolstering the South, he said, required “a continuing examination by responsible officials in the executive branch.” But the Senator’s basic position was simple and blunt: the United States should “continue to defend its vital interests with respect to Vietnam.”
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That general view had substantial support in early 1964, however imprecise the perception of “vital interests.” The popular media offered no significant opposition. Reporters who would later win Pulitzer Prizes for their criticism of the war were at this point proposing an enlarged commitment. Until late 1967, public-opinion polls consistently demonstrated widespread support for Johnson’s policy, which ostensibly steered a middle course between total war and withdrawal. There is also evidence that the steady escalation in the period after 1964 had solid public approval.
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The margin of public support and approval, however, had to be balanced against a steadily growing opposition that reflected deep divisions within American society.

Vietnam had historically been a difficult problem. The Chinese and the French had failed to understand, let alone master, the area. American policy-makers had little to guide them besides the well-worn Cold War principle of keeping the dominoes from tumbling, and an unshakable belief that an aggressive Communist China was manipulating its North Vietnamese puppets. Critics who thought the President had not prosecuted the war adequately operated on these premises. Richard Nixon, in a March 1965 speech, argued that the Vietnam war really was a war with China, with all of the Pacific Rim and Asia at stake. Nixon called for bombing in the North and more aid to the South.
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Little sophisticated analysis was applied to what was a complex situation. The policy that emerged was more the product of default and inertia than of design. Johnson’s challenge to present “viable alternatives” to his policies went unanswered by those increasingly uncomfortable with the drift of events.

The policy of a limited, contained American involvement in Vietnam was doomed to frustration. Eventually, policy-makers and the country faced the hard choices of expansion or withdrawal. The concept of limited war was consistent neither with the President’s personality nor with the temperament of the American people. The outcome of the Korean War, a decade earlier, had never been understood or accepted; for Vietnam, the American people
eventually demanded total victory or withdrawal. Curiously, Johnson himself on occasion recognized the difficulties. He was acutely aware of Harry Truman’s experience with public opinion and the Korean War. In his January 1965 message to Congress, Johnson warily warned that “we may have to face long, hard combat or a long, hard conference, or even both at once.”

The truths and realities of Vietnam were hard to understand; they were even harder to explain. Johnson’s concern for ensuring his popularity left no space for such frankness. Thus, much of the expanding American commitment occurred amid secrecy that in turn was a handmaiden to deception. For four years, the Johnson Administration carried out an extensive air war in Laos, hidden from most of the Congress and the public.
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Laos typified the Administration’s working combination of secrecy and deception rather than candid explanations of policies and goals. The subsequent cost of that style proved terribly high.

The intractability of the Vietnam war, and Johnson’s conduct of it, undermined his cherished preference for consensus-building. The war’s frustrations inevitably produced a swelling chord of domestic dissent. For Johnson, there was no response except to harden his position. His view of consensus “had come to mean balancing existing forces rather than bending them into new shapes.” Imaginative solutions were cast aside as the President desperately sought public approval, even if securing approval required dissembling and the stifling of dissident views. Johnson had hoped that if he had “to turn back I want to make sure I am not in too deep to do so.” By 1967, however, he was deep in the Vietnam “mud.” “We face more cost, more loss, more agony,” he reported in his 1967 State of the Union message. The result was that the master of crafty, pragmatic politics now emerged as a rigid ideologue, seemingly unresponsive to emerging political realities.
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The pressures on Johnson came in equal measure from those who wanted to “win” the war and those who wanted to end American involvement—“hawks” and “doves” were the simple labels given the players. The doves—largely the liberal intelligentsia—were more articulate and vocal than their adversaries, yet less effective in influencing the President. University campuses and classrooms, political journals, and literary magazines offered convenient forums for denouncing Johnson as a “preternatural villain, a monster who had seized on domestic liberalism as a cover for his stupid (or cunning, depending on the writer’s needs) intervention in Vietnam.” In time, the President and these critics passed the realm of dialogue and descended into shrill, often insulting, characterizations of each other’s views. Johnson responded with more bitterness, more isolation, more bombs, and more insistence that he was right and that history would vindicate him.
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Criticism from hawks seemed less overt; yet it may have had more impact. Goldwater’s 1964 position sparked enough fear and trembling in Administration
circles to contribute to the first significant escalation of the war. Johnson kept a wary eye on the right wing—the “great lurking monster,” as he once characterized it. An aide revealed that Johnson feared merciless attacks from conservatives if he left South Vietnam destabilized. The Left, he was certain, could be contained or more easily satisfied; a Right that capitalized on his foreign-policy failures, however, might well imperil his cherished Great Society.

The military represented an uncertain quantity to Johnson. Was there possibly another Douglas MacArthur lurking in the wings? Admiral Thomas Moorer, a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, grumbled at the restraints the President had imposed on the use of military power and his close superintendence of that use. Moorer advocated an amphibious assault on the North, or even just the credible threat of one. The North, he realized, could deploy most of its troops in the South without having to fear any strike against its home terrain. “They didn’t believe it at first, and then, finally, they came to the conclusion that we were really that stupid,” Moorer later complained.

Lady Bird Johnson, the President’s wife, afterward recalled that the major pressure came from such congressional conservatives as Senators Russell, Stennis, Byrd, and Thurmond—“people demanding that we get this thing over with by dropping the deadliest of bombs.” The President listened to them. He was used to accommodating his former Senate cronies as if he were still Majority Leader. And then in Green Bay, Wisconsin, in February 1968, Republican candidate Richard Nixon must have sent a chill down Johnson’s spine when he sounded the same note, insisting that the only effective way to force Hanoi to the bargaining table was to “prosecute the war more effectively.”
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Johnson was described by a contemporary as “king of the river and a stranger to the sea.”
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He was a clever navigator of the congressional stream, paddling deftly through its pools and eddies, ever alert for the occasional sandbar. But in the open sea of foreign policy, with its shifting, almost imperceptible currents, its swells and tempests—there he was out of his depth. He could not be the master he wished to be, and this only embittered and frustrated him more. What he knew best did not apply in these unpredictable waters. International politics was not domestic politics writ large.

The concern over Johnson’s policies in Southeast Asia eventually went beyond his personality, raising the issue of the nature and power of the presidency itself. That power had come a long way from the pristine handiwork of the framers of the Constitution. The history of presidential power is a history of aggrandizement; the transformation of the office in the twentieth century alone has been remarkable.
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Economic dislocation, global wars,
and the assumption of world leadership have focused power in the presidency, and with it the rapt attention of a fascinated, often adoring, public.

The expansion of presidential power was by and large welcomed and approved, and perhaps nowhere more eagerly than in the liberal and academic communities. Richard Neustadt, a former presidential aide and a leading student of the institution, suggested that the new powers and responsibilities of the modern presidency dictated a new constitutional view. By 1964, the old constitutional partnership between executive and legislative branches on the crucial questions of war and peace had been modified by new technology. The president, Neustadt argued, was the only one in the system “capable of exercising judgment under the extraordinary limits now imposed by secrecy, complexity, and time.” The president must be the man in charge; he must, Neustadt concluded, “stretch his personal control, his human judgment, as wide and deep as he can make them reach.”

One of Neustadt’s critics noted that such behavior ordinarily would reflect “excessive, even pathological, vanity and opportunism.” Neustadt wrote largely to applaud John F. Kennedy’s self-image as president, the image Kennedy sought to project both within government and in the public arena. But Kennedy never really fulfilled his own image. Johnson, however, made it living, striking reality—and found that the celebrants of a strong presidency no longer were so certain or so forthcoming in their approval.
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