Yet there were many who were not reassured, who regarded Johnson with scorn and often with contempt. LBJ-haters continued to be found in large numbers among the creative communities in large cities and on university faculties. Visiting the United States in 1965, the British journalist Henry Fairlie wrote: “I have found nothing more strange or unattractive than the way in which American intellectuals take pleasure in reviling President Johnson.” Fairlie noted that the strictures were “personal” and reflected a “fastidious disdain for the man…. He is a slob, one of them said to me…. Others say much of the same, if less briefly.”
Dwight Macdonald, one of the most caustic of them, wrote of “tasteless, crude” Lyndon Johnson and minted a word, “midcult,” to mock the President’s middlebrow taste. Macdonald and others like him ridiculed Mrs. Johnson because her favorite television program was Gunsmoke. They despised LBJ for enjoying the New Christy Minstrels, telling photographers to “Use my left profile,” disliking Peter Hurd’s portrait of him, having a daughter who changed her name from Lucy to Luci, and calling the work of serious artists “artsy.” Their discontent spread to the much larger number of Americans who were vaguely offended by Johnson’s mountebank manner. Millions of others were susceptible because they had loved John Kennedy, grieved for him still, and irrationally felt that Johnson was a usurper. To all these, eventually, were added the vast mass of Americans who felt troubled or even threatened by the escalating violence in the Negro slums in large cities and the growing turmoil on campuses. Johnson’s insistence that he was in charge made him an inviting target, and they let fly at him.
At the end of his unprecedented string of legislative successes on the Hill in 1965 he entered Bethesda Naval Hospital for the removal of a stone-obstructed gallbladder. Convalescing, he brooded about the newspapers, which had been baiting him, and his taunters, “those people out there.” In exasperation he blurted out, “What do they want—what really do they want? I’m giving them boom times and more good legislation than anybody else did, and what do they do—attack and sneer! Could FDR do better? Could anybody do better? What do they want?”
Senator Eugene McCarthy, whose role in the collapse of Johnson’s consensus would become crucial, found half of the solution to the riddle when he suggested that Johnson was a kind of anachronistic President, providing New Deal remedies—social welfare legislation—for a nation whose dilemmas were very different. It was arguable, for example, that affluence, not poverty, was the great domestic challenge of the 1960s. McCarthy said that the President completely misjudged the temper of the liberal intellectuals: “he keeps going to them with the list of bills he’s passed—the laundry list—and he doesn’t know that they aren’t interested any more.”
Johnson raged, “Don’t they know I’m the only President they’ve got?” Sometimes he would add, “Don’t they know there’s a war on?”
They knew. That was the other half of the answer to the riddle.
***
After the Gulf of Tonkin incidents there was a lull in American activity in Vietnam until November 1, 1964, when five U.S. military advisers were killed and 76 wounded in a Viet Cong mortar attack on an air base at Bienhoa, twenty miles north of Saigon. On Christmas Eve the guerrillas struck again, planting a bomb at the Brink’s Hotel in Saigon. American casualties there were two dead and 58 wounded, and Lyndon Johnson’s patriotic instincts were aroused. He strode around the White House saying that he wasn’t going to let them kill our boys out there, that they were firing on the flag, that he’d show them he wasn’t any “Chamberlain umbrella man.” Plainly the North Vietnamese were guilty of aggression. (“Aggression is when one country won’t let another one alone. Everybody knows when that is happening.”) But depending on the United Nations to act would be a mistake. (“It couldn’t pour piss out of a boot if the instructions were printed on the heel.”) He wasn’t going to go down in history as the President who lost Vietnam. The United States had the power to teach these little-biddy, raggedy-ass Communists a lesson. The Tonkin resolution gave him the authority to use it, and if the Viet Cong didn’t back off he would do just that.
The difficulty was in deciding which approach to take. This new enemy, being unconventional, resisted conventional military solutions. The mighty American martial establishment wasn’t equipped to deal with their hit-and-run tactics. President Kennedy had sent to Vietnam a 400-man Special Forces group, experts in antiguerrilla warfare, but the Joint Chiefs were unenthusiastic about these husky elitists. At one time, of over a hundred American generals in MACV, not one had gone through counter-insurgency training at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. And of all of them, none was more of a traditional soldier than MACV’s new commander, William Childs Westmoreland.
What the Chiefs wanted was heavy bombing of North Vietnam. That would bring the enemy to his knees, they told the White House, and it would also bring him to the negotiating table. Clearly the bombing mystique had a powerful hold on the Johnson administration. Why this was so is less obvious. Two influential Democrats, George Ball and John Kenneth Galbraith, had participated in the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey after World War II. That study had found that Allied bombing had not only failed to cripple German war production; it had strengthened the morale of the German people. And Germany was highly industrialized. If the Air Force had failed there, certainly its chances against the economy of a backward Asian country were at best doubtful.
Not all of Johnson’s advisers had faith in the bombardiers. Ball and Galbraith didn’t, and they were far from being alone. Early in 1964 the State Department’s Policy Planning Council had conducted an exhaustive survey of the bombing question. The conclusion was that bombing North Vietnam would be ineffective, that it wasn’t even likely to boost spirits in South Vietnam. Pier de Silva, John Richardson’s successor as CIA station chief in Saigon, thought bombs would be useless; so did Westmoreland. As West Point graduates, both men knew that if you brought in planes you would need troops to protect the landing fields—that the decision to bomb would therefore bring the United States in all the way. Early in 1965, CIA analysts in Saigon completed two lengthy new reports on the same issue. The gist of them was that unleashing the bombers would be worse than futile; there was a strong probability that it would boomerang by touching off a massive infiltration of North Vietnamese troops down the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
That should have given the White House pause. At the very least the President ought to have listened intently to the counsels of caution. But something mysterious was happening to the doves, as opponents of escalation were beginning to be known. There were fewer and fewer of them in the halls of power. In October of 1964, when George Ball at State submitted his first memorandum protesting further American involvement in the war, he had plenty of company. Then, one by one, his allies were transferred or eased out of key positions. Roger Hilsman, Averell Harriman, Michael Forrestal, Paul Kattenburg, William Trueheart—all were gone by the time of Johnson’s inaugural. Ball stood alone. Maxwell Taylor, who had agreed with Ball about bombing, was still an insider, but Taylor had changed his mind. He now wanted a green light for the Air Force. He thought the U.S. troop level in Vietnam could be controlled and need never rise above 100,000.
Now only one major White House special assistant was still uncommitted. He was McGeorge Bundy, the President’s national security adviser. On January 27, 1965, Bundy proposed that he visit Vietnam as the President’s eyes and ears. McNamara concurred, and Johnson’s security aide flew to Asia in the first week of February. It was a fateful trip. Bundy was brilliant and experienced, but he had never served in the field. All he knew of war was in memos and reports or on celluloid. The grime and the stench of combat were new to him, and when he encountered them he suffered a physical revulsion. Above all—and this would be decisive—he could not stand the sight of blood.
On the evening of February 5, while Bundy was being feted in Saigon, Spec. 5c Jesse A. Pyle of Marina, California, was taking up sentry duty in a foxhole outside a U
.S. stronghold at Pleiku, a mountain town in Vietnam’s central highlands. He was still there at 2 A.M. when he saw shadowy figures in black pajamas moving toward him through underbrush. Pyle opened fire; the Viet Cong guerrillas replied with a storm of grenades; Americans in their nearby barracks awoke and joined the fight. The Battle of Pleiku lasted fifteen furious minutes. At the end of it the guerrillas had demolished or damaged sixteen helicopters and six aircraft. Eight U.S. soldiers, Pyle among them, were dead. Another 126 were wounded.
At 2:38 P.M. in Washington, the first account of Pleiku reached the President. After a four-hour National Security Council meeting he ordered Navy jet fighter-bombers from three carriers to attack a Viet Cong staging area at Donghoi, forty miles north of the 17th Parallel. Whether or not the American combat role would grow, he announced, was a decision which “lies with the North Vietnamese aggressors.” McNamara said, “I think it’s quite clear that this was a test of will.” But the most unexpected result of Pleiku was its impact on the President’s national security adviser, who, being on the spot, visited the wounded and came away deeply moved. He flew home a hawk. “Well, they made a believer out of you, didn’t they?” the President said to him. “A little fire will do that.”
Ball was still opposed to the bombing. Vice President Hubert Humphrey was also against it, and he expressed himself so forcefully that Johnson, who now regarded such doubts as unmanly, excluded him from National Security Council meetings. The United States had entered the critical period of decision. McNamara later remarked that all the U.S. errors in Vietnam—and he conceded that there had been many—were committed by the late spring of 1965; after that, he said, there was no way out. In Washington it seemed that the Viet Cong was bent upon provoking the U.S. into massive intervention. Less than three days after Pleiku, black-pajamaed guerrillas blew up the Viet Cuong Hotel, a barracks for American soldiers in the Annamese port of Quinhon; 23 enlisted men were killed and 21 injured. Johnson, infuriated, gave orders for a three-hour bombing of Chanh Hoa and Chap Lee, military depots in North Vietnam.
On February 11 the Viet Cong hit Quinhon again. This time LBJ stayed his hand for forty-eight hours. When he did move, however, it was to take a long step down the road of escalation. Henceforth American reprisals from the air were not to be on a one-for-one, tit-for-tat basis. Instead Johnson ordered a sustained bombing campaign against the North, to be mounted without regard for provocation. Its code name was to be Operation Rolling Thunder. The justification for it was set forth in a sixty-four-page white paper, Aggression from the North, which, the State Department said, established “beyond question that North Viet Nam is carrying out a carefully conceived plan of aggression against the South.” To defend Da Nang air base, fifty miles southeast of Hue, from which Rolling Thunder would be launched, General Westmoreland asked for two Marine Corps battalions. These 3,500 marines were the first U.S. ground troops to be committed to the war. On March 8 they splashed ashore under overcast skies at Nam O Beach, three miles from Da Nang. Awaiting them were ten smiling Vietnamese girls with flowers.
Elsewhere the landing was more controversial. In Moscow two thousand demonstrators hurled rocks and bricks at the American embassy; two western foreign correspondents were roughed up there. In the United States the teach-ins spread and reached a climax in Washington, where Bundy agreed to debate his critics on a program which would be broadcast to over a hundred campuses. (At the last minute he had to withdraw; the President needed him to deal with another foreign crisis in the Dominican Republic.) The administration sent a “truth team” to visit universities and reply to the charges of faculty doves. Dean Rusk caustically told the American Society of International Law, “I sometimes wonder at the gullibility of educated men and the stubborn disregard of plain facts by men who are supposed to be helping our young to learn—especially to learn how to think.”
But the more the critics of the war learned about its South Vietnamese ally the stronger their reservations became. Half of U.S. aid, they learned, was going into the Saigon black market. Vietnamese youths from opulent families were buying their way out of the draft. The desertion rate in the South Vietnamese army was 15 percent. And the politicians in Saigon seemed to have a genius for bad timing. It seemed that at every critical moment in the conflict whatever government was in power would be overthrown by a new regime. Johnson, angered, told his staff that he wanted “no more of this coup shit,” but he got it just the same. On February 21, 1965, Lieutenant General Nguyen Khanh was ousted and succeeded by Phan Huy Quat, a physician. (The secretary general of the junta behind Quat was Major General Nguyen Van Thieu, from this point forward a man to watch.) The Quat administration lasted exactly 111 days. When it toppled (the ninth change of government since Diem’s assassination) the new prime minister was the colorful chief of the Vietnamese air force, Nguyen Cao Ky, and Thieu was deputy prime minister.
Each new sign of instability in Saigon increased the ranks of the doves, who were rapidly replacing the Republicans as Lyndon Johnson’s most effective political opposition. Former Secretary of the Army Cyrus Vance said misgivings about the war were “threatening to tear the United States apart,” and in the Senate Frank Church of Idaho, one of the first senatorial doves, warned: “There are limits to what we can do in helping any government surmount a Communist uprising. If the people themselves will not support the government in power, we cannot save it…. The Saigon government is losing its war, not for lack of equipment, but for lack of any internal cohesion.”
That was not yet a popular position, however. When Johnson asked for a 700-million-dollar supplemental appropriation to finance the escalation, the House approved, 408 to 7, in twenty-four hours, and the Senate followed suit, 88 to 3, in another twenty-four hours. In the popular press a certain stigma was attached to disapproval of American participation in the war. When Majority Leader Mike Mansfield gloomily told the Senate that it might go on “for four, five, or ten years,” an Associated Press writer called this an “extreme view.” (It was to be eight years.) In its annual review of that year’s news the AP, ordinarily the most impartial of institutions, also reported that opponents of the war were giving aid and comfort to enemies of the United States. And when Senator Fulbright held Vietnam hearings in April, providing a forum for such distinguished critics of administration policy as George Kennan and General James Gavin, twenty-four NBC-TV stations refused to carry their network’s coverage of them, while CBS-TV blacked them out entirely.
The war was becoming steadily hotter for the Americans in Vietnam. On March 30 a Vietnamese driver parked a black Citroën in front of the U.S. embassy in Saigon and roared off on a companion’s motorcycle. In the car were 250 pounds of explosive, which went off at 10:55 A.M., tearing a hole in the side of the building and killing seventeen embassy employees. The next day U.S. planes bombed six North Vietnamese radar installations. It was their fifteenth raid across the border between the two Vietnams since Pleiku. The Viet Cong countered with more explosives. A bicycle loaded with nitroglycerin was parked one evening on the bank of the Saigon River beside My Canh, a floating restaurant popular with foreigners. When it went off forty-four people, twelve Americans among them, were killed. Still the U.S. troop buildup went on. At the beginning of the year there had been some 25,000 American servicemen in the country; by the end of spring the number had tripled.
On June 9 the White House announced that General Westmoreland had been authorized to send U.S. soldiers and marines into battle “when other effective reserves are not available and when in his judgment the general military situation urgently requires it.” Four days later Westmoreland decided that circumstances at Dong Xoai, a district capital sixty miles north of Saigon, justified American intervention. After a clash in the night, 1,200 paratroopers of the U.S. 173rd Airborne joined 1,600 Vietnamese and Australians in aggressive pursuit of the guerrillas. Westmoreland called this a “search and destroy” mission, a phrase which would be used henceforth to describe the strategy, which evolved in
these months, of seeking out and then wiping out Viet Cong bands. It was to be a costly and often frustrating process. The Dong Xoai melee was characteristic of the war; after the smoke had cleared it was impossible to say which side had come off best. All the commander of the 173rd could be sure of was that he had lost nineteen men. The casualty lists swiftly lengthened, for the Viet Cong were in the second month of their spring offensive. Long afterward Westmoreland would describe this as the time that the enemy won the war. No one knew it at the time, however. That same month Westmoreland asked Washington for forty-four fresh battalions and authority to use them as he saw fit, and he could not guarantee that even that would do the job.
It was in this period that Lyndon Johnson’s deviousness and secretiveness began to shrivel public trust in him. Referring to it on May 23, a copyeditor on the New York Herald Tribune put the phrase “credibility gap” over a story by David Wise, the newspaper’s White House correspondent. Then Murray Marder of the Washington Post, in an article analyzing the feeling, widespread in Washington, that the President was sometimes careless with the truth, wrote: “The problem could be called a credibility gap.” Johnson’s glittering peace promises in the 1964 campaign were being recalled and contrasted with his new martial stance. Marder noted a “growing doubt and cynicism concerning administration pronouncements in Washington.” Reporters were particularly susceptible to it. Because the President had denounced Senator Goldwater for proposing the very policies he himself was now adopting, the press was becoming skeptical of new olive branches being extended by the White House.
The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972 Page 157
