The Wars of Watergate (6 page)

In his maiden speech to the Senate in March 1949, Lyndon Johnson had warned that the modern president, with his “virtually unlimited powers of influence,” and the unchecked power of his aides, represented “a force well-nigh irresistible.” Senator Johnson, of course, saw all this as potential tyranny, and with a typically exaggerated rhetorical flourish, pictured the Senate as offering, if necessary, “the precious last-ditch fighters for freedom against a tyrannical president.” Sixteen years later, he confidently asserted that he need not have the concurrence of Congress for his actions in Vietnam. “The authority of the president is very clear and unquestioned without a resolution,” he said. “The Commander in Chief has all the authority that I am exercising.” And a year later, in July 1966, he told a crowd that his election meant that while many could advise and a few had to consent to his policies, only he had “been chosen by the American people to decide.” He was that “force well-nigh irresistible.”
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Executive power once seen as beneficent was now perceived as arrogance, as the war and criticism of it steadily expanded in tandem. Johnson loved the limelight, often demanding it from others more deserving. But suddenly he found himself an unwanted center of attention as the situation in Vietnam deteriorated. At issue now were
his
war,
his
mounting casualties,
his
inadequate or misguided bombing raids, and
his
soaring inflation. Just as Johnson had exaggerated his power, critics equally exaggerated his responsibility for their frustrations.

The war effort itself, of course, was a casualty of the growing dissent. Equally important, perhaps, there was widespread questioning—most significantly, from the liberal forces in America—of a presidency that perhaps was too unbridled, too unchecked, and just too powerful.
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The longstanding public unease and disquietude with Johnson took on added dimensions. He had rapidly expended the huge political capital he had gained in 1964. Now he was perceived as a man who had both lost control and was out of control. The combination was fatal.

The first month of 1968 portended the “continuous nightmare,” as Johnson later characterized the final year of his presidency. It was, he said, “one of the most agonizing years any President ever spent in the White House.”
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By then, he interpreted assaults against the United States as personal humiliations, even when his fault was minimal or the enemy’s victory dubious. On January 23, 1968, North Korea—perhaps North Vietnam’s prototype in Johnson’s eyes—seized the USS
Pueblo
, a highly sophisticated spy ship. One week later, the North Vietnamese and their Viet Cong allies unleashed the Tet offensive. No matter who might have been the immediate or long-range military victor of the Tet engagements, the sight on American television screens of an enemy assault in the courtyard of the American Embassy in Saigon only deepened public frustration with the war.

Perception was taken as reality, and the perception throughout much of the world and in the United States was that the United States and its South Vietnamese ally had been mortally humiliated. Tet actually resulted in severe losses for the enemy once American troops struck back with a counteroffensive. But the North Vietnamese boldness and audacity belied repeated assurances from Johnson and General William Westmoreland that the war was being won. Tet’s most conspicuous casualty was the President.
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At best, the Vietnam war was difficult to explain or understand; Tet stands out as one of the more complex moments. It simply could not be treated definitively with each successive day of a journalist’s deadline. The sight of Viet Cong troops swarming through the American Embassy compound was indeed stunning and unforgettable, but it may have been more symbol than substance. The television reporter from Saigon who had negotiated that precious ninety seconds from his network could not explore much below the surface sensationalism. Even if he had, chances are his words would not have correlated with the spectacular film of fire fights in the embassy’s courtyard. The ultimate reality for the President and his advisers was that three of every four Americans received their news in this way.

Tet truly was a media event. Journalists hastily praised the enemy offensive for its discipline, organization, and success—judgments not necessarily in accord with reality. Later studies demonstrated that the North Vietnamese and their Viet Cong allies had not executed their plans very effectively and that, in fact, American and South Vietnamese troops had fought well. Without
doubt, the media’s “major distortion of reality—through sins of omission and commission—… helped shape Tet’s political repercussions in Washington and the administration’s response.”
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Meanwhile, television showed a South Vietnamese police chief publicly executing a Viet Cong guerrilla in another shocking image which generated widespread revulsion.

The antiwar movement gained its apostolic benediction on February 27, 1968. CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite—oft cited as the “most trusted man in America”—journeyed to Vietnam following the Tet offensive to survey the war’s progress. His judgment was emphatic and stunning: “It seems now more certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate.” Johnson allegedly told his Press Secretary that if he had lost Cronkite he had lost “Mr. Average Citizen.” Cronkite in effect put his imprimatur on a rising feeling that the war was no longer worth the effort. Clearly, the public was no longer in a mood to tolerate Johnson’s handling of the struggle. While national support for the war stayed at about the 45 percent level between November 1967 and March 1968, approval of the President’s conduct sank to an abysmal 26 percent.
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Tet, it seemed,
was
his fault.

Late in 1967, Minnesota Senator Eugene J. McCarthy decided to challenge President Johnson in the forthcoming spring primaries. What at first seemed like nothing more than a quixotic gesture soon offered a channel for the public’s growing disaffection with the President. Everything about McCarthy seemed ambivalent: his liberal commitments, his interest in being a senator, and even his sincerity in challenging the President. But the mistake was to take him at less than his word. Whatever his original intentions in entering the primaries, McCarthy proved to be a formidable David in the classic confrontation against Goliath.

McCarthy may have fashioned himself in the mold of Thomas More, ready to risk disfavor with the King rather than submit to his heresies. McCarthy’s importance in the days following Tet, however, lay not in offering any stark contrast to Johnson—indeed, the Senator opposed unilateral withdrawal—but rather in the fact that he dared to confront the President and publicly question his authority. The anti-authoritarian mood of that “Age of Aquarius” gave McCarthy an aura and legitimacy for the disaffected and alienated. His detachment and deliberately muted criticisms served him well (at least until June) and struck many as refreshingly cool, given the overheated political climate. McCarthy moved quietly but emphatically against an imperious ruler and his obsequious retainers. The Senator’s bold proposal to dismiss General Lewis Hershey, the Selective Service Director, and J. Edgar Hoover, the seemingly untouchable head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, suggested some new direction, different from the long-prevailing course of hallowed institutions.

New Hampshire’s Democratic governor readily dismissed McCarthy, stating
that the Senator would get barely 5 percent of the primary vote in his state. Perhaps that is all he would have garnered if he had been perceived only as an antiwar candidate. But Tet changed the campaign. Public resentment ran high because of the embarrassment of that debacle, and the resentment was shared by supporters of the war as well as opponents. Now Johnson was the man “who could neither pacify the ghetto, speak the plain truth, lick inflation, nor above all end the war.”
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The Tet backlash focused attention in early March on the New Hampshire primary, the nation’s first. The results shocked the nation. Hawks joined doves, Republicans crossed over—and McCarthy captured 42 percent of the vote, and the majority of the state’s delegates. Whether McCarthy was David or Thomas More was questionable; but he had unquestionably embarrassed the President of the United States.

Invigorated by his New Hampshire “victory,” McCarthy moved on to Wisconsin, which was far less politically ambiguous than New Hampshire. The old Progressive tradition, the high level of political activism, and a longstanding tradition of suspicion toward foreign adventures quickly made McCarthy the frontrunner in the state’s primary. McCarthy’s appeal to his Wisconsin neighbors transcended the war issue. More than anyone else at the time, McCarthy recognized the deeper issue of presidential power and its abuse—an enormously sensitive subject in a state with deep-seated distrust toward public officials. He suggested that presidential candidates acknowledge the limitations of power. Most of all, he twitted Johnson for personalizing the office. “A President should not speak of ‘my country’ but always of ‘our country’; not of ‘my cabinet’ but of ‘the cabinet,’ because once the cabinet is appointed, it becomes something different from the man who may have nominated these persons, even from the Senate which confirms them in office.” In more playful moments, McCarthy sarcastically noted the President’s references to “my helicopters,” or “my troops.” Johnson’s conception of the office was wrong, McCarthy stressed. The office “belongs not to the man who holds it but to the people of this nation.”
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With less than a week to go before the Wisconsin election, Johnson’s supporters in the state predicted McCarthy’s overwhelming triumph. Projected estimates for the Senator ranged as high as 65 percent of the vote. Meanwhile, the swelling opposition to the President encouraged Senator Robert F. Kennedy to announce his own candidacy. Ironically, the immediate effect was to create bitter divisions in the anti-Johnson and antiwar camps.

The Tet surprise, the New Hampshire rebuke, the prospect of repudiation in the Wisconsin primary, the new reality of the ever-present Kennedy threat, the inability to get Hanoi to the bargaining table, the rebelliousness of Congress—to name only the most obvious factors—projected a different image of the President, one of Gulliver harassed by an army of Lilliputians. And
they seemed about to topple him. Physically ill and worn, obsessed with the fear of a second heart attack, demoralized by his failure to win the hearts and minds of Americans, Johnson announced his withdrawal from the presidential race in a March 31 televised address. “I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your President.” The President also announced a partial bombing halt, stressing a desire to avoid partisan entanglements for the sake of “the presidency” and the opportunities for peace; but he fooled very few. The political system had mastered him—not the other way around—as his editorial and public support dropped sharply, and key supporters drifted away or opposed his policies. The primary results portrayed a painful truth: the President was not very widely loved, and worse, he was judged a failure. He may well have rationalized his withdrawal as giving him an opportunity to gain, as Doris Kearns has written, “more control over and more love from history—the only constituency that really mattered in the end.”
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The President’s withdrawal was cloaked in typical, albeit understandable, secrecy. The day after announcing it, Johnson insisted that his action had been long planned and had nothing to do with his declining political fortunes. Nevertheless, it seemed—and again, the perception was important—that media and street politics had, for the first time, driven a president from the White House. Johnson acknowledged as much when in a speech to broadcasters in Chicago on April 1, he blamed the failure of the war on the media which had fostered and marshaled unfair opposition to that war and his policies.
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Johnson’s decision to withdraw provoked a great outpouring of affection and goodwill (even though the lingering skepticism was such that a sizable portion of the media and the public doubted whether he really was through as a candidate). He was, as he so often reminded the people, “the only president you’ve got.” Images of November 1963 and his healing force, as well as his inspiring legislative
tour de force
, briefly flashed on the scene. The President’s popular approval rating soared from 36 to 49 percent. For the first time in many months, the White House mail came overwhelmingly from friendly correspondents.
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Yet little warmth or depth characterized the response; there was mostly numbness. The war had deeply divided the American people, and those who supported and opposed it at last could agree: it was best for the President to go. The momentary rush of good feeling certainly did not usher in a new era; rising social tensions and the events of the electoral season soon rekindled and unleashed almost boundless furies.

The nation had rejected Johnson as it had few other sitting presidents. He was perceived as a man who had misled, maybe even willfully deceived, the American people. To achieve his aims, he had attempted to suppress countervailing forces and institutions; his imperiousness and arrogance had led
him to ignore dissident voices, outside and inside the White House, and had provoked the unprecedented protests that rent the land. Johnson’s failure to accommodate or temper those protests eventually isolated him and left him no alternative but to leave the presidency—and to leave it largely in disgrace.

Johnson’s decision was both exhilarating and disturbing. The critics of the war and of the growing excesses of presidential power could take great satisfaction in Johnson’s departure. The “voice of the people” had been heard; democracy had been served. But few pondered the implications for the nation and the presidency. Johnson’s presidency lay in ruins—confused, demoralized, and pervaded with bitterness. The presidency itself, battered from without and distorted from within, had suffered enormously. And worse was yet to come.