Only weeks after becoming president, while focused full-bore on Kennedy’s stalled legislative program, Johnson was warned by his military advisers that unless the tide of the war was reversed by greater involvement on America’s part, South Vietnam might succumb to communism within a matter of months. “It just worries the hell out of me,” Johnson told his national security adviser, McGeorge Bundy, explaining, “I don’t think it’s worth fighting for and I don’t think we can get out. And it’s just the biggest damn mess I ever saw.” However troublesome Vietnam was for his military advisers in those early days, for Johnson the war was on the back burner of an enormous stove. What he initially wanted was simply containment of the problem, protection against making a serious error that might in any way compromise the momentum of his domestic vision.
What emerged was an incremental decision-making process, a course predicated as much on what not to do as on what to do. The leader whose entire persona was built upon an aura of “can do,” found himself in a reactive posture at odds with his active, driving temperament. Lacking the self-confidence he radiated in domestic affairs, the judgment that allowed him to override domestic advice that contradicted his own instincts born of long experience, Johnson heeded the counsel of a small circle of holdover cabinet members and advisers—“the best and the brightest.” By and large, that cadre represented the established wisdom, the shared generational predisposition that the war was a struggle between communism and democracy, that losing the struggle would incite the falling dominoes of communist aggression and profoundly weaken America in the Cold War.
While in the domestic arena he had called upon task forces outside of government to solicit new ideas and approaches unbound by conventional thinking, here he failed to reach out either to dissenters within his own administration or to Southeast Asia scholars in universities and think tanks. He ignored those who argued that South Vietnam was not vital to America’s national security, that its loss at that moment, before major U.S. escalation, would likely be interpreted as a setback to the Free World rather than solely an American defeat.
Piecemeal, without a clear strategic agenda or narrative, Johnson’s decision making lacked both coherence and conviction. After Viet Cong guerrillas raided the barracks of U.S. advisers in February 1965, he approved retaliatory air strikes against targets in North Vietnam. Next, he added troops to protect the air bases from which the air raids were launched. Shortly thereafter, he sent more troops to protect the marines—the same marines who were there to protect the air bases. By April, more than fifty thousand troops were in South Vietnam. The mission was no longer to protect the air bases but to permit participation in active combat if nearby Vietnamese units were in trouble. By June, permission had been granted to commit American troops to combat, in conjunction with Vietnamese forces or on their own.
All his life Johnson had believed that every man had his price, that if he could sit down and look that man in the eye, he would figure the cost of compromise. If he could only get into a room with Ho Chi Minh, he was sure he could convince him to recognize the strength of the forces against him. The war, Johnson said, would be “like a filibuster—enormous resistance at first, then a steady whittling away, then Ho hurrying to get it over with.” Holding fast to the belief that this was a battle between two antagonistic groups with negotiable interests, Johnson never recognized that the war in Vietnam was a civil war, a social revolution, and that the will of the North Vietnamese, fighting in and for their own country, was stronger than that of their American-bolstered counterparts in the South.
When bombing failed to bring the uncompromising North to the table, the baffled Johnson offered to transplant a benevolent American dream onto Vietnamese soil. The terrible paradox of his position cannot escape notice: While his left hand continued to raze the Vietnamese landscape, his right hand proposed a billion-dollar project for the social and economic betterment of both Vietnams. He would dam the Mekong River to generate such vast amounts of power as to overshadow the New Deal’s Tennessee Valley Authority. He had seen it all before in miniature with the electrification of the Hill Country. He would establish new schools, new roads, new houses and bring “the wonders of modern medicine” to small villages. From mounting destruction and desolation would come the reconstruction of a Vietnamese Great Society.
By July 1965, it was clear that neither the sustained bombing nor the promises of development would bring North Vietnam to halt their infiltration of the South. Johnson’s inner circle of advisers told him once more that the South was in danger of collapse. To “stave off defeat,” they recommended a massive expansion of American troops (eventually reaching more than 500,000), and once more he capitulated. They urged him to order the mobilization of 235,000 reservists, declare a “state of emergency,” put the economy on a wartime footing, ask Congress for higher taxes to pay for the war, and let the people know that we were embarked upon a major war.
Nowhere is the failure of leadership more pronounced than in decisions made that July. While accepting recommendations for a major war expansion, Johnson simultaneously rejected counsel to inform Congress and country of the likelihood of a protracted and costly struggle. Thereafter, Lyndon Johnson unquestionably owned the war. Determined to keep voting rights, immigration reform, and prospective Great Society legislation moving forward, he decided instead to tell Congress and the public no more about the war than was absolutely necessary. “I could see and almost touch my youthful dream of improving life for more people than any other leader including FDR,” he later said. “I had no choice but to keep my foreign policy in the wings. I knew the Congress as well as I know Lady Bird, and I knew that the day it exploded into a major debate on the war, that day would be the beginning of the end of the Great Society.”
In sum, all the skills Johnson had utilized to construct the Great Society were now employed with negative force to conceal the full extent and nature of the war from the American people. To avoid a dramatic announcement of the need for more men, he increased draft calls and extended enlistments rather than mobilize reserves. He folded the announcement of an additional fifty thousand troops into a crowded midday press conference. He refused to ask Congress for a war tax. While formerly he had toiled to shave the budget in order to dislodge the tax cut from legislative limbo, he now adroitly manipulated the budget to obscure rising defense costs, a decision that eventually stoked inflation and squeezed the very domestic programs he sought to protect.
As the war dragged on month after month, year after year—from 1965 to 1968—public dissatisfaction deepened. Demonstrations that began on American campuses spilled onto the streets, with crowds reaching tens of thousands in city after city. When Arkansas senator J. William Fulbright initiated hearings that provided public debate on the conduct of the war, Johnson was unwilling to listen. Ravenous for information in favorable times, he hunkered down, further narrowing his circle of advisers to those who agreed with his policy of slowly mounting escalation. Unwilling to shoulder responsibility when support for his leadership began to shrink, he found ubiquitous scapegoats—the press, the intellectuals, the ultra-liberals, outside agitators. And all the while, he continued to deceive the public about the toxic slough the war had become.
Glaring evidence that Johnson had broken faith with the American people came in early 1968, when North Vietnam and the Viet Cong launched their Tet offensive deep within South Vietnam. Though the incursion was ultimately blunted, the televised films of captured cities and bloody skirmishes belied the administration’s repeated assurances that the war was going well, that there was light at the end of the tunnel. It was too late now to placate or level with the public. A sense of betrayal had descended upon the country, the commencement of a terminal disconnect between Johnson and his countrymen. His credibility, already suspect, entered into free fall. A majority of people had come to believe that he had systematically misled them. Most pervasive and damaging, the loss of faith in this president would initiate a lingering mis
trust in government and in leadership itself.
A central measurement of a democratic regime can be gauged by questions its leaders share with the public, how important decisions are explained and defined for the country at large. The business of war entails the severest sacrifices that can fall on ordinary men and women. In war, more than at any other time, the people must be sufficiently informed to understand the choices that are being made. In the end, no statesman can successfully pursue a war policy unless he has instilled a sense of shared direction and purpose, unless people know what to expect and what is expected of them. By all these standards of candor and collaboration between a leader and the people in the critical time of war, Lyndon Johnson had failed.
Finally aware of the full measure of public dissatisfaction with his conduct of the war, Lyndon Johnson struck upon a way to extricate the country, as well as himself, from the punishing bind of war. In a televised address on March 31, 1968, he announced that he was unilaterally de-escalating the war by halting the bombing in North Vietnam. He then startled the nation by stating categorically that he would neither seek nor accept the nomination of his party for another term as president. The reasons for his surprising withdrawal were, in Shakespeare’s words, “as plentiful as blackberries.” The public’s affection and support—the life-blood of his career—were gone. Success in the upcoming primaries was anything but assured. He felt he had used up “every ounce” of the substantial political capital he had possessed at the time of his landslide election. His personal capital of vitality, energy, and resilience was dangerously depleted. And given his family’s history of heart disease, he did not believe he “could survive another four years of the long hours and unremitting tensions.”
Yet, beyond these political and personal reasons, Johnson’s eyes were fixed on the verdict of history. By renouncing his candidacy, he sought to address seemingly intractable problems from above the fray. Perhaps, then, without the taint of self-serving motives, Hanoi might credit his peace initiative. Freedom from partisanship would also strengthen his hand in securing a tax increase, which by now had become absolutely essential to the nation’s health. And closest to his heart, his removal from the race might successfully prod the passage of a third major civil rights law which had been stalled in Congress for two years—a fair housing act designed to prohibit discrimination in the sale or rental of any dwelling on the basis of race, color, religion, or national origin.
The immediate response of the press seemed to justify Johnson’s aspirations. Headlines trumpeted “Lyndon Johnson’s finest hour,” calling his withdrawal “an act of political selflessness unexceeded in American political history.” Even his harshest critics, like Senator Fulbright, viewed his withdrawal as “an act of a great patriot.” When North Vietnam expressed a willingness to come to the table, Johnson’s popularity soared. In a matter of weeks, Congress passed both the tax surcharge and the Civil Rights Act of 1968, known as the Fair Housing Act. With this housing bill, Johnson proudly noted, “the voice of justice speaks again.” For a time, the president looked and acted, one journalist noted, “like a man who had just invented peace of mind, peace of soul, or both.” Johnson’s euphoria did not last. The initial flurry of peace talks petered out. The war that had ravaged both Vietnam and America continued its ruinous course. The fault line through Lyndon Johnson’s presidency would split his legacy and haunt him for the rest of his life.
EPILOGUE
OF DEATH AND REMEMBRANCE
Just as there was no single path that four young men of different background, ability, and temperament followed to the leadership of the country, so toward the end of their lives they harbored different thoughts about the afterlife of leadership, of death and remembrance.
While their personal stories came to very different ends, they were all looking beyond their own lives, hopeful that their achievements had shaped and enlarged the future. The fame they craved, the recognition they sought, bears little resemblance to today’s cult of celebrity. For these leaders, the final measure of their achievements would be realized by their admittance to an enduring place in communal memory.
Two of the four men died in office. Abraham Lincoln, at the time of his murder, was fixed upon the task of healing the gravely wounded nation. Franklin Roosevelt was mustering his ebbing strength for the prospect of tying up the war and preparing for the complicated peace in its wake.
Theodore Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson both survived beyond their presidencies to experience the problematic aftermath of leadership. Theodore Roosevelt was never able to surrender his dream of returning to power. On the day he died, he was making plans to run for president again in 1920. By contrast, Lyndon Johnson knew, with a consuming sadness, that his days of active leadership had come to an end. The four years left to him were more bitter than sweet—as I was there to witness.
* * *
During his last months in the White House, Johnson had often spoken with me about going to Texas to work full time on his memoirs and the establishment of his presidential library in Austin. I was looking forward to returning to Harvard, where I was scheduled to begin teaching. When I hesitated and asked if we could work out something on a part-time basis, Johnson replied with an emphatic “No. Either you come or you don’t.”
On his last day in the White House, Johnson called me into the Oval Office. “I need help,” he said quietly, “part-time as you wish, on weekends, during vacation, whatever you can give.” This time I had no hesitation. “Of course I will,” I said. “Thanks a lot,” he replied, adding, “Now you take care of yourself up there at Harvard. Don’t let them get at you, for God’s sake, don’t let their hatred for Lyndon Johnson poison your feelings about me.”
I turned to go, but he called me back to say one more thing. “It’s not easy to get the help you need when you’re no longer on top of the world. I know that and I won’t forget what you’re doing for me.”
So, in the months and years that followed, while beginning my teaching career at Harvard, I spent academic breaks and parts of summer vacations in Austin and at the ranch. I became part of a small team of former speechwriters, aides, and staff members assisting Johnson in the process of writing his memoirs. Happily, I was assigned to the chapters on civil rights and the Congress, but we all worked together, combing through files, preparing questions for recorded conversations with the president that were designed to serve as the basis for the book.
During discussions about the Vietnam War he would invariably stiffen, shuffling through his papers before uttering a word, his voice hardening and dropping to a whisper. Unlike Franklin Roosevelt or Harry Truman, Johnson was the type who would “wear out the carpet walking up and down worrying whether they had decided something correctly.” Truman, Johnson once wistfully explained to me, “never looks back and asks, ‘Should I have done it? Oh! Should I have done it!’ No, he just knows he made up his mind as best he could and that’s that. There’s no going back. I wish I had some of that quality, for there’s nothing worse than going back over a decision made, retracing the steps that led to it, and imagining what it’d be like if you took another turn. It can drive you crazy.” Though rarely voiced, Johnson’s regrets over Vietnam were turned over in his mind every day.
By contrast, when he recounted stories about work with Congress on domestic issues, his vitality filled the room. He would rise from his desk and stride up and down, employing his masterful gifts for mimicry and storytelling while impersonating Harry Byrd, Richard Russell, Hubert Humphrey, or Everett Dirksen, rendering vivid snatches of dialogue on the budget and civil rights. These were full-blown theatrical performances, the language enhanced by his facial expressions and extravagant gestures. His spirits aroused, Johnson was able to tap once more the positive energy of the early days of his presidency.
In preliminary drafts of the two chapters I was working on, I quoted directly from the arresting stories Johnson told, hoping to capture something of his natural speaking style, his wide-ranging insigh
ts, impersonations, and bawdy humor. “God damn it, I can’t say this,” he instructed me after perusing the pages. “It’s a presidential memoir, damn it, and I’ve got to come out looking like a statesman, not some backwoods politician!” No amount of argument could persuade him that his repertoire of stories was appropriate for a dignified memoir. Consequently, his vernacular voice, outlandish depictions, and the swiftness of his mind were left on the cutting-room floor—only to reemerge when the recordings Johnson secretly made during his private telephone conversations from the White House were finally released to the public.
Johnson was never fully engaged in his memoirs. He repeatedly addressed the idea that history’s judgment was already stacked against him. “All the historians are Harvard people. It just isn’t fair. Poor old Hoover from West Branch, Iowa, had no chance with that crowd. . . . Nor does Lyndon Johnson from Stonewall, Texas.” If such statements contained more than a habitual strain of self-pity, they also signified that he knew that his presidency had not been all he had hoped. His aversion to the memoir project also represented an antipathy to the completeness, the final tying up of his life’s work. Finishing his memoirs meant that his long public service, his usefulness, was done with. “There’s nothing I can do about it,” he said. “So I might as well give up and put my energies in the one thing they cannot take away from me—and that is my ranch.”
During these years, Johnson’s altered appearance was striking. Gone was the slicked, groomed hair which, over time, grew into long white curls over his collar. His dark presidential suit and polished oxfords had been traded in for short sleeves and work boots. An informal atmosphere prevailed in the place Lady Bird called “our heart’s home.” Family dinners often took place in the small kitchen or, as in so many homes in Middle America, on trays before the television in the comfortable living room.
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