A basic objective was to coordinate all federal programs at the local level to support the model city policy. This proved impossible. HUD’s own urban renewal program, its largest, was potentially of great significance. But its officials viewed model cities as a threat by coopting funds intended for physical improvements and spending them on social programs as well as by turning its emphasis from high-value real estate into low-cost housing. Further, urban renewal worked through local agencies insulated against city hall, while model cities went straight to the mayor. There was a similar conflict with the Office of Economic Opportunity, whose community action agencies worked directly with the poor and bypassed city hall. Again, the Labor Department’s manpower program flowed through the states and it was legally impossible to divert it to the cities. White House intervention through Califano to persuade these agencies to support model cities brought forth few results. While all offered words of cheer like these from Secretary Wirtz—“I wholeheartedly concur with your letter of September 27, 1968, on the importance of a coordinated Federal response to the Model Cities program”—none would turn over funds or significantly change procedures.
On December 23, 1968, a month and a half after Nixon’s election, HUD announced that the first Comprehensive Development Plan—for Seattle—had been approved. Eight more were accepted before inauguration day, January 20, 1969. While the new President was eager to terminate the program, he met opposition from mayors, governors, members of Congress, and his own HUD secretary, former Michigan Governor George Romney. Funding did not cease until June 30, 1973.4
Lyndon Johnson had extremely high hopes for the model cities program. He wrote in his autobiography that it was
an entirely new way of approaching the problems of the slums. This new approach was based on the proposition that a slum is not merely decaying brick and mortar but also a breeding ground of human failure and despair, where hope is as alien as sunlight and green grass. Along with new buildings to replace the crumbling hovels where slum dwellers wore out their deprived existences, we needed to offer those slum dwellers a genuine opportunity to change their lives—programs to train them for jobs, the means of giving their children a better chance to finish school, a method for putting medical clinics and legal services within their reach. The proposal was an approach to the rebuilding of city neighborhoods in a total way, bringing to bear on a blighted community all the programs that could help in that task.
A noble vision, to be sure.
But, as conservatives never tired of pointing out, it was a mirage. “There was not in 1965, when the second task force did its work,” Edward C. Banfield wrote, “the slightest possibility of a federal program being brought into existence which could accomplish any of the various large purposes that Model Cities was supposed to serve.” No slums were cleared, no blighted areas were redeemed, low-cost housing was not provided, and there was no flood of new jobs, schools, medical clinics, social centers, and playgrounds in the ghettoes. There was neither enough time nor enough money to accomplish these goals, and the program was unable to overcome the complexities and gridlock inherent in the American system of government.
But there were some unanticipated accomplishments. Rufus P. Browning, Dale Rogers Marshall, and David H. Tabb studied the impact of model cities, along with the poverty program and urban renewal, in ten towns in the San Francisco Bay area. The questions they raised were narrower: Did these programs stimulate local governments to provide services to the poor and increase their ability to organize for the purpose of promoting the responsiveness of these cities? “Respondents were virtually unanimous in perceiving federal social programs as important in shaping both the mobilization and incorporation of minorities, and city government responsiveness. … Rather than quieting demands, the programs generated them by providing issues, a staff, and resources for organizing efforts.” As a result, blacks and Mexican-Americans won public offices, became influential in city governments, and during the seventies won a growing share of federal funds under the revenue sharing and block grant programs to improve the lives of their constituents. This was hardly Lyndon Johnson’s dream, but it resulted in hard gains for the minorities.5
19
The Collapse of the Johnson Presidency
JOHN Gardner had been Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare since August 18, 1965. It had been a superb period of his life, a time of enormous accomplishment. Further, “I had developed a great affection for HEW and, really, I loved the place, and I loved many of the people in it and it was mutual in many cases.” He had fought “side-by-side with them” on important issues in an atmosphere of “excitement and exhilaration and real combat.” He had developed a great admiration for Lyndon Johnson, “as easy man to work with” who gave Gardner “a free hand, … a lot of support.” Most important, he provided a “positive movement that we all drew on.”
In late 1967 and early 1968, however, Gardner had attended several cabinet meetings to discuss Johnson’s reelection. “I found to my consternation … in early January that I did not think that the President should run for reelection, which put me in a terrible position. … Literally every day something was occurring in which I was privy to conversations that should only be participated in by loyal members of the family.” The President, Gardner thought, had the right to expect that every member of his cabinet “supports him completely.”
A few days later Gardner was in the Oval Office presenting a letter to the President announcing his resignation. Johnson asked why he was leaving. Gardner explained that he could no longer provide total allegiance because he had concluded that Johnson should not run. Again, why? “I … don’t believe that you can unite the country. I … think we’re in a terrible passage in our history and that you cannot do what needs to be done.”
To Gardner’s great surprise, the President said, “I’ve had the same thought many times.” He continued, “I’m going to do what Harry Truman did. I’m going to wait until the end of March.”
For both Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson the departure of John Gardner was a painful loss. He was both an outstanding member of the administration and a treasured friend.
In mid-January Mrs. Johnson gave a luncheon for a large gathering of Women Doers on the topic of Crime in the Streets. After a lunch that was, she wrote, “a little on the sumptuous side,” the speeches began. Shortly, Eartha Kitt, a prominent black singer, angrily denounced the Vietnam War. “We send the best of this country off to be shot and maimed. They rebel in the streets. They take pot and they will get high. They don’t want to go to school because they are going to be snatched off from their mothers to be shot in Vietnam.” She pointed her finger at Lady Bird and said, “You are a mother, too, although you have had daughters and not sons. … I have a baby and you send him off to war.”
Mrs. Johnson was swept with “a wave of mounting disbelief.” Then she took control of herself and closed the meeting. She had seen the reporters’ pencils “racing across the pads.” Eartha Kitt’s outburst had created a brief press sensation.
Mayor Richard Daley of Chicago was a stalwart supporter of LBJ and was generally regarded as a confirmed hawk. Now, Larry O’Brien said, “I was taken aback when Daley expressed concern about Vietnam. He expressed it in human terms, his deep concern about the loss of life, then ultimately in political terms, his wonderment about the ultimate political fallout. … It had gotten to him.” The fact that his best friend’s son had been killed in Vietnam helped turn Daley against the war.
Commander Lloyd M. Bucher had spent 11 years on submarines. In December 1966 he received orders to transfer to secret Operation Clickbeatle, electronic intelligence by small unarmed auxiliaries in the waters of potential enemies. The Navy with Clickbeatle was copying a similar Soviet program, which, however, employed much larger vessels. After extended briefings, Bucher reported to the Bremerton Naval Shipyard on Puget Sound where the ship he would command, the USS Pueblo, was being overhauled and fitted with electronic gear. In heavy rain on
January 29, 1967, he viewed his ship for the first time. His heart sank.
The Pueblo had been built 25 years earlier as a coastal freighter and had been in mothballs for a long time. She would now join two similar ships in the new operation. The Pueblo and her sisters may have been the smallest vessels in the Navy—176’ long (shorter than some tugs), a 33’ beam, displacing a mere 935 tons. A crew of 83 would be stuffed into bunks tiered four high; the galley was miniscule; toilet facilities were very short. The vessel was unseaworthy and needed virtually every kind of repair, plus installation of the electronic gear. She also received two .50 caliber machine guns, but there was no place to install them. The Pueblo did not complete sea trials and sail until November 6, 1967. The Pacific crossing required repairs both at Pearl Harbor and at Yokosuka on Tokyo Bay.
The Pueblo then labored in heavy seas around Honshu, through the Strait of Tsushima, and up the east coast of Korea. She was now fulfilling her mission by intercepting messages. Late on the afternoon of January 2, 1968, the Pueblo was off Wonsan and was observed by a North Korean subchaser, a Soviet built SOI, from 300 yards. The next day two North Korean trawlers inspected the ship from 100 yards.
On January 23 two subchasers and four torpedo boats surrounded and attacked the Pueblo. Escape was impossible. The vessel’s top speed was about 12 knots, the subchasers 25, and the small boats about 50. Cannon and machine-gun fire killed one seaman and wounded three others. The superstructure was heavily damaged. Bucher was unable to bring his machine guns into the action. The North Koreans boarded the Pueblo and forced her into the port of Wonsan, where the crew was imprisoned. Bucher had radioed his predicament and the news sped up the chain of command.
That day, January 23, the President invited Secretary of Defense-designate Clark Clifford to the Tuesday lunch on national security. The news was dreadful and Johnson was weary and depressed. U.S. troops had inadvertently but seriously violated Cambodian neutrality, which demanded a public apology. The day before a B-52 loaded with nuclear weapons had crashed seven miles short of the runway in Greenland and was slowly sinking into the North Atlantic. Denmark was extremely sensitive about nuclear weapons on its territory. The biggest battle of the war in Vietnam was about to begin at Khe Sanh, where 6000 Marines were surrounded. There was talk of another Dienbienphu. Now the seizure of the Pueblo! Johnson, paranoid by now, was convinced that it was part of a Communist plot to encircle the U.S. He expected the next blow to fall in Berlin. He was wrong. The surly and ruthlessly independent North Koreans had acted alone. But the U.S. government, concerned about the 82 captive American sailors, had to remain powerless and silent. Rabid hawks denounced the President for failing to retaliate. Trevor Armbrister summarized: “An ill-prepared nation sends an unfit ship with an inexperiencjd crew on an unsuccessful, perhaps unnecessary mission off the coast of an unfriendly nation.”
The real significance of the Pueblo incident, Armbrister wrote, was that it “demonstrated—perhaps more shockingly and convincingly than any event in recent years—the real limitations of American power.” This is what critics of the Vietnam War, in particular Senators Fulbright, McCarthy, and Robert Kennedy, were saying. Within a week a far bigger demonstration of those limitations would take place.1
In July 1967 the North Vietnamese high command reexamined its strategy for a war of attrition to outlast the U.S. The enormous American build-up had changed the prospect from victory to stalemate, which delayed, if it did not threaten, the unification of the country under Hanoi. Thus, they reversed their strategy and called for a “General Offensive and General Uprising.” It would be a grand throw of the dice in a massive attack which would, they hoped, generate a revolt of the people of South Vietnam to overthrow their puppet rulers and demoralize the Americans. For the remainder of the year they prepared their forces, North Vietnamese and Vietcong, and poured troops, munitions, and supplies down the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
Military operations started with heavy diversionary attacks around the periphery of South Vietnam intended to suck Westmoreland into a dispersion of his units. In October the North Vietnamese struck at the Marine base at Con Thien near the demilitarized zone, as well as at Loc Ninh and Song Be along the Cambodian border. In November they attacked Dak To in the central highlands. In December they advanced into the Mekong Delta. In January 1968 two crack North Vietnamese divisions moved against the Marines at Khe Sanh in the extreme northwest. From these attacks and many other items of intelligence Westmoreland concluded that a major offensive was in the offing, which he welcomed because of his great superiority in firepower.
Tet was the Vietnamese holiday celebrating the Chinese lunar New Year. It was the most important and sacred day of the year, universally recognized by all religions and social classes and respected in both North and South Vietnam. The northerners had stopped their fire on Tet starting in 1963 and Saigon and the U.S. had done so beginning with 1965. In 1968 they jointly agreed to lay down arms for 36 hours from 1800 on January 28 to 0600 on the 31st. The Year of the Monkey began on January 30.
On January 30–31, 1968, the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong broke the truce with the Tet offensive. It was, Herbert Y. Schandler wrote, “one of the great events of the Vietnam War, a high point in the military action, and, in all likelihood, the only battle of the war that will be long remembered. It has been seen by many as an historic turning point.” It had never crossed Westmoreland’s mind that the North Vietnamese would attack during Tet. A U.S. Military Academy textbook later stated: “The first thing to understand about Giap’s Tet offensive is that it was an allied intelligence failure ranking with Pearl Harbor in 1941 or the Ardennes offensive in 1944. The North Vietnamese gained complete surprise.”
The North Vietnamese and the Vietcong launched simultaneous and coordinated attacks against population centers throughout the South—39 of the 44 provincial capitals, 5 of the 6 autonomous cities, and at least 71 of 245 district towns. They aimed primarily at military command installations and centers of civilian authority, intending to shatter morale.
Some 35 battalions, about 4000 men, many in small teams, struck boldly in the Saigon region—Tan San Nhut Air Base, the Presidential Palace, the South Vietnamese Air Force headquarters, government buildings, the radio station, and, most dramatically, the American Embassy.
Nineteen Vietcong commandos reached the compound at 3 a.m., blasted a hole in the thick wall, and dashed inside with automatic weapons blazing, killing five Americans in minutes. It took U.S. troops more than six hours to kill the commandos and secure the embassy.
For the first time American television crews based in Saigon had a magnificent opportunity to photograph the raging war in the city itself. Heretofore they had voyaged out to the jungle or to the rice paddies to cover the unseen war. Americans at home, Stanley Karnow wrote, had grown accustomed to a “familiar pattern of images” on their TV screens, “the grueling reality of the struggle—remote, repetitious, monotonous, punctuated periodically by moments of horror.” Now, on the January 31 evening news, they witnessed a “drastically different kind of war.” “There, on color screens, dead bodies lay amid the rubble and rattle of automatic gunfire as dazed American soldiers and civilians ran back and forth trying to flush out the assailants.” The most extraordinary footage was shot on a street corner. The crude, brutal General Nguyen Ngoc Loan, the chief of police, put his pistol to the head of a captured Vietcong and pulled the trigger. NBC showed the event in color on the news and AP photographer Eddie Adams captured it in black and white for the front page of virtually every newspaper in the U.S.
The most bitter battle of Tet took place in Hué, the ancient, beautiful, and cultivated city along the Perfume River on the north coast. Early on the morning of January 31 four powerful columns smashed into the city, overcame the defenders, and ran up the Vietcong flag on the citadel. They carried lists of “cruel tyrants and reactionary elements,” rooted people out in house-to-house searches, and shot them, clubbed them to death, or buried them alive. La
ter about 3000 bodies were recovered in river beds, salt flats, and jungle clearings. The counterattack included South Vietnamese troops, many natives of Hué, who fought well. But the main burden was carried by three U.S. Marine battalions. With heavy artillery and air support they gradually occupied most of the city, pinning the enemy in the citadel. They were not overcome until February 25. By then about 80 percent of the city had been destroyed. The estimated number of soldiers killed: 140 Marines, 400 South Vietnamese, 5000 North Vietnamese and Vietcong. Again, much of the battle for Hué played in American living rooms on TV.
The Tet offensive was broken in eight weeks of bitter fighting which exacted a terrible cost in lives. Clark Clifford reported the number of killed: 3,895 Americans and 4,954 South Vietnamese. It was said that 58,000 of the enemy had also died in battle. While this astronomical figure was hard to believe, Karnow’s interviews in the North after the war convinced him that it was “plausible.” The Vietcong had been seriously battered and the North Vietnamese had sustained severe losses.
The Battle of Khe Sanh, the largest and bloodiest of the war, overlapped Tet and was fought for a ring of hills in the extreme northwest of South Vietnam between the demilitarized zone and the Laotian border. It was a tribute to Westmoreland’s bad judgment. He thought the attacks on the cities to the south were a feint and that Khe Sanh was the main prize. In fact, it was the other way around. President Johnson was equally wrong, but for another reason. He thought the North Vietnamese were trying for a second Dienbienphu and was determined to prevent it. Obsessed, he had a sand table model of the Khe Sanh plateau built in the Situation Room in the basement of the White House. Unable to sleep, he would wander in during the night in his bathrobe to read the messages, to examine aerial photographs, and to get the latest casualty figures. Both sides poured in massive forces and suffered heavy losses. After Westmoreland left his command in June 1968, the Americans, Karnow wrote, conducted “a withdrawal … in secret to avoid jarring the American people.”
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