Landslide (37 page)

I
F THERE WAS
one visible sign that all was not quite right with the president, however, it was the moments he chose for these prophecies of greatness. Early in the afternoon of March 1, Johnson came to the Cabinet Room to address a group of high school students who had won that year’s Westinghouse National Science Prize. This group, leading lights of the coming generation, represented the best hopes of the oh-so-hopeful age, and Johnson was expansive in his description of the Great Society they would surely know. “
Peace on earth, good will toward men,” he told them. “That must be our objective and that must be the pledge of my generation, and yours.” Declaring that their lifetimes would surpass the age of Columbus as an age of discovery, he imagined what the four hundredth anniversary of the explorer’s voyage to America would look like:

“Peace on earth, good will toward men …” This was a nice thing for a president to say, and a bold one. Later in his speech, he even dared to echo the words of Neville Chamberlain after Munich, expressing hope that in their “twilight years,” the students could say they’d known “only peace in [their] time.”

“He remembered two wars. But I have lived my life and I haven’t known any …” And this was a deeply dishonest thing for this president to say. Only hours after Johnson finished speaking to these students, the military he commanded would commence a sustained bombing campaign against North Vietnam.

The military’s code name for the operation was “Rolling Thunder.” Johnson’s hope was that the Vietcong, witnessing the Americans’ power, would suspend their guerrilla efforts in the south. But it would not be that easy. The prediction Johnson gave the students—that next year the money for tanks and bombs could go to education instead—would prove empty. The bombing campaign, scheduled to last eight weeks, would in fact go on for three years. And the students, just shy of fighting age, would not know “only peace” in their time. For the next eight years they would know war, a war in which hundreds of thousands of their peers would be drafted to fight, a war in which, as the journalist and historian Stanley Karnow notes, the U.S. military would deliver to “
an area the size of Texas, triple the bomb tonnage dropped on Europe, Asia and Africa during World War II.”

The Johnson presidency had been heading straight toward that war for months. After his show of strength in the Tonkin Gulf incident the prior August, he had tried to keep Vietnam out of the headlines before the November election. The Vietcong did manage to
grab attention to the conflict on November 1 when they launched a surprise attack on an American air base twelve miles north of Saigon, killing four Americans and two South Vietnamese. It was clear to anyone who bothered to read the news stories from Southeast Asia that the situation there was slipping out of control.
Throughout 1964, a massive and well-organized Vietcong army grew in strength, swelling with indigenous South Vietnamese recruits, bolstered by supplies ferried in from the north along the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

The North Vietnamese watched as a calamitous succession of weak governments rose and fell in the American-backed south. They believed that Communist domination across Vietnam was within reach. America, with its guarantees to the governments in Saigon, was the great remaining obstacle. As 1964 drew to a close, the Vietcong grew ever more bold, hoping to puncture the notion that America had built an impenetrable fortress in the south.
On Christmas Eve, they took provocative action, exploding a bomb in Saigon’s Brinks Hotel, home to American military personnel. The bomb, which killed two Americans and injured fifty-eight others, was intentionally detonated at a quarter to six in the evening—precisely the moment when American officers were known to gather for happy hour in the hotel bar.

By then it was clear to American officials in Washington and Saigon that the Johnson administration’s Vietnam policy needed fixing, fast. “
We are presently on a losing track,” cabled Ambassador Maxwell Taylor in early January. “To take no positive action now is to accept defeat in the fairly near future.” By month’s end, McNamara and Bundy had come to the same conclusion. “
Both of us are now pretty well convinced,” Bundy wrote to Johnson, “that our present policy can lead only to disastrous defeat.”

And so at precisely the moment when Johnson was preparing his August push for the Great Society, he had to decide whether to escalate or withdraw in Vietnam—to choose, as he saw it, full-on war or disgraceful defeat. The timing would seem a tragic coincidence, the
beginning of an awful split in the story of the Johnson presidency. On one side of the screen are the triumphs of his domestic program, on the other the morass of Vietnam. The Vietnam side slowly creeps over the dividing line until, before long, it is all the eye can see.

Students of history are no doubt familiar with this split. It is standard practice in assessing the Johnson presidency to put Vietnam and the Great Society on opposite sides of the historical ledger. His great domestic achievements are weighed against his failings in Southeast Asia. His lies about Vietnam are weighed against his transformational impact on civil rights. The two President Johnsons—liberal reformer and Vietnam warmaker—are seen as combatants, forever locked in a push-pull struggle in which one’s loss is always the other’s gain.

Yet here, too, is a moment when history was shaped by a convenient overlap in the interests of opposing parties. Progressives, when accounting for the backlash against Johnson’s domestic policies in the latter part of the 1960s, can blame public dissatisfaction with Vietnam.
If only he hadn’t gotten bogged down in the war, he could have exerted his full energy and attention on the administration of the Great Society
. Vietnam hawks, meanwhile, can explain the war’s failure as a product of Johnson’s reluctance to put the country on a war footing for fear that those steps would endanger his Great Society aims.
If only he had leveled with the American people about the need to fight, then the war could have been won
.

Many of Johnson’s biographers have leaned toward this divided view as well. The first wave of Johnson scholars to work with a generation’s distance was in the 1990s, a moment uniquely suited for a split understanding of his presidency. In comparison to the politics of the nineties, marked by partisan stalemate and small ambitions for government, the great hopes and legislative successes of the Johnson years seemed to shimmer. At the same time, after the rapid, dramatic collapse of the Soviet Union, it began to look in retrospect as though America’s triumph in the Cold War had been assured all along. In that light, Johnson’s preoccupation with the “domino theory”
and the high stakes in South Vietnam looked silly and his prosecution of the war in Vietnam unforgivable.

The 1990s also saw the release of the Johnson tapes, which revealed a stunningly paradoxical president—a man who could be charming, cunning, and coolly rational one moment and alarmingly crass, cruel, and paranoid the next. Johnson’s apologists suddenly had to account for auditory evidence that the president and his advisers had held grave doubts about their chances for success in the war even as they had committed American forces to die. Baby boomers who had grown up thinking of Lyndon Johnson as a lying warmonger were stunned to find themselves in the thrall of this captivating man giving the Johnson Treatment over the phone. There were too many sides to this new Lyndon Johnson, too many angles that didn’t add up. It was best—and easiest—to understand him as a man hopelessly divided between the best and worst of impulses.
The Triumph and Tragedy of Lyndon Johnson
, the title of a memoir published by Johnson aide Joseph Califano in 1991, summed up the established view.

In a way, this was how Johnson himself wanted to be remembered. In the last years of his life, as he watched American forces struggle on in Vietnam during his retirement at the LBJ Ranch, he knew that the war would be a black mark on his legacy. He hoped, though, that history would cover the Great Society and his civil rights bills in gold. The Vietnam sections of his memoirs drip with fatalistic sorrow: it was a war that cruel fortune forced him to fight. He encouraged the notion that his domestic and foreign presidencies had been in perpetual conflict—for his time and for his soul. Vietnam, he told Doris Kearns Goodwin, was “
that bitch of a war on the other side of the world” that kept him away from “the woman I really loved—the Great Society.”

There is no denying that Johnson’s triumphs in the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts stand in stark contrast to his failures of credibility and creativity as commander in chief. Still, to accept that the good and the bad of the Johnson presidency are irreconcilable and
separate is to erect a wall across the Johnson presidency that wasn’t really there. In fact, there was only one Lyndon Johnson who served as president, both at home and abroad, in the years 1963 to 1968. And the best and worst moments of the Johnson presidency came from the same man and sprang from the same place.

In the spring of 1965, the key moment of decision making, Johnson’s Vietnam and Great Society policies were not in conflict. Rather, they worked hand in glove. Since 1945, Cold War liberals had accepted as an article of faith that a progressive domestic program could only be passed if it was matched with a muscular anticommunism abroad. That conviction had animated the writings of liberal intellectuals like Schlesinger and Galbraith and had guided Democratic officeholders from Truman to Kennedy. It was no coincidence that Truman had fought the Korean War even as he tried to pass the Fair Deal through Congress, just as it was no coincidence that Kennedy’s first push for the New Frontier coincided with his great anticommunist misadventure, the Bay of Pigs. Johnson understood the rule better than most. He was not willing to risk a new approach. “
I knew that Harry Truman and Dean Acheson had lost their effectiveness from the day that the Communists took over China,” Johnson told Doris Kearns Goodwin. “I believed that the loss of China had played a large role in the rise of Joe McCarthy. And I knew that all these problems, taken together, were chicken shit compared with what might happen if we lost Vietnam.”

And so, as he considered how to address the deteriorating situation in Vietnam, Johnson’s determination to produce a historic domestic program in early 1965 propelled him
toward
escalation, not away from it. His advisers understood as much and made their recommendations accordingly.
After the November election, Assistant Secretary of State for the Far East William Bundy (Mac Bundy’s older brother) convened a study group on the situation in Vietnam. The group presented the senior figures of Johnson’s national security team with three policy options going forward. Option one was for the United States to maintain the course it was currently on in
Vietnam. Option two was to escalate dramatically and commence a broad offensive against the Vietcong all at once. Or, option three, the United States could commence a flexible, incremental offensive increase, starting with select targets in Laos and North Vietnam.
“Bundy,” Karnow writes, “had resorted to a classic bureaucratic device known as the ‘Goldilocks Principle.’ By including one choice ‘too soft’ and one ‘too hard’ he could plausibly expect the upper-echelon ‘principals’ to go for the ‘just right’ option—in this case, the third, which he himself favored.” The principals, and Johnson, favored it, too. By February 1965, they had determined on a course of deliberate, calibrated escalation. All they needed was an event that could provide the pretext for a strike.

It came early in the morning of February 7, in a place called Pleiku. There the Vietcong used purloined maps to launch a prolonged mortar attack on an American garrison. “We’re going to die,” an American voice shouted as enemy forces stormed the compound, “
we’re all going to die.” Eight Americans were killed, and the dramatic attack at last captured the attention of the American media. The assault had been meticulously planned: the invaders had a detailed knowledge of the garrison’s layout. The timing also seemed suspicious, and provocative. At the time of the attack, McGeorge Bundy had been visiting Saigon to assess the situation firsthand. Twenty-four hours earlier, Soviet premier Alexei Kosygin had arrived in North Vietnam to consult with the Communist leadership.

Suddenly the stakes in Southeast Asia seemed very high. Many Americans had managed to get to that point in time with only a dim awareness of what was happening in Vietnam. No longer. “
Not only Americans,” declared
Newsweek
in the following week’s edition, “but people everywhere on earth felt the sudden chill that makes living in the second half of the twentieth century a new departure in man’s experience: a chill born of the awareness that any small localized war, may, through misjudgment or mischance, flare up into a holocaust that could blot out civilization.”

In Washington, Johnson sought immediate action. He ordered retaliatory bombing and asked for plans for the prolonged campaign that would become Rolling Thunder.
The National Security Council considered a request from General William Westmoreland, the American military commander in Southeast Asia, for two Marine battalions that could fortify the air base at Danang.

Here was a Rubicon to cross—once Johnson deployed ground forces, he would be in an Asian land war. But the president hurried across to the other side. Invited to join a National Security Council meeting, Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield played the role of skeptic—worrying over the dangers of the war widening to include the Chinese and the Russians, wondering if a negotiated settlement could be reached. “
Even as he finished, the others at the meeting could tell that Johnson had welcomed his dissent,” David Halberstam wrote in
The Best and the Brightest
, his classic account of Vietnam decision making. “It was a desired part of the scenario because it permitted Johnson to do his performance, which he now did. No, there was no alternative. We had tried to be peaceful, we had tried to disregard provocation in the past, but now it had gone too far. Lyndon Johnson, he said, was not going to be the President of the United States who let Munich happen.”