Guns or Butter

by Bernstein, Irving;

  As night fell about 4000 demonstrators were encircled by 300 policemen. They taunted the officers, surrounded a police car, and sat down on the avenue. A police line advanced onto those seated and began arresting them to clear the intersection. The cops, tired and angry, beat people indiscriminately, and the intersection, Walker wrote, “fragmented into a collage of violence.” Police discipline collapsed. They attacked people with their batons and with mace. They tossed bodies into paddy wagons. By 8:15, after an hour of police violence, they controlled the intersection. Shortly, the National Guard took over the area. Thereafter there was sporadic violence in the Loop. After midnight the police without provocation invaded McCarthy’s suite on the 15th floor of the Hilton, which outraged him.

  The police reported 192 officers injured, of whom 49 were hospitalized. More than three-fourths of these injuries occurred on Wednesday. A total of 81 vehicles were damaged. It was impossible to count the number of demonstrator injuries. Hospitals reported treating 45 on Wednesday, but that could only be a small fraction of the total. The arrests totaled 668, more than half from the Chicago area. Many newspaper and television reporters were beaten and suffered damage to their equipment.

  Nevertheless, the cameras recorded the event and the nation and the world witnessed the sickening violence on television. Among them were Humphrey, who was slightly tear-gassed, McCarthy, and a large number of the delegates at the convention. When Carl Stokes, the black mayor of Cleveland, rose to second Humphrey’s nomination, NBC replaced him with the bloody rioting. McCarthy was so angered by police conduct that he refused to go to the Amphitheatre to give his support to Humphrey after his nomination.

  Senator Ribicoff went through the motions of nominating McGovern. He looked down at Daley only 20 feet away and said, “With George McGovern we wouldn’t have Gestapo tactics on the streets of Chicago.” The mayor, purple with rage, shouted an obscenity which could not be heard in the pandemonium.

  The balloting began at 11 p.m. and half an hour later Humphrey went over the top with Pennsylvania at 1,317V2. O’Brien and others strongly recommended Senator Edmund Muskie of Maine for Vice President and Humphrey accepted him. O’Brien said, “I thought Muskie had a recognition factor that was very favorable. He was ethnic [Polish], which could be helpful. Ed Muskie had a presence that would add significant dimension to the ticket.” This was the only good thing that happened to Humphrey that day.

  The Democrats left Chicago embittered, deeply divided, and certain that they had already lost the election. While Humphrey in his acceptance speech urged them to take heart, Broder wrote, “he knew and they knew that he emerged from the convention a beaten man.” He would say later, “After Chicago, I was like the victim of a hurricane, having to pick up and rebuild but with too little time to do the job.” As McCarthy’s plane was taking off, the pilot announced over the intercom: “We are leaving Prague.” The polls now showed an enormous drop in Humphrey’s support and Nixon with a handsome lead. Nixon and Wallace rubbed their hands with anticipation.

  During early September Humphrey drew small and often hostile crowds and showed no improvement in his numbers. His campaign was in disarray. When O’Brien proposed an early speech in Boston, Teddy Kennedy told him that it was “premature.” O’Brien had the “clear feeling they didn’t want him. That was the first cold shower.”

  As O’Brien viewed the campaign, “there were two overriding problems. One was Vietnam and the second was money.” Vietnam was critical because, if patched up, it could bring back the McCarthy and Kennedy supporters, could present a “strong, decisive Hubert Humphrey,” and offered a “splendid opportunity to go on the attack” against Nixon and Agnew. In the latter part of September Humphrey decided to make a nationally televised speech on the war on the 25th in Salt Lake City. The trouble was that he set up a drafting committee chaired by Agriculture Secretary Orville Freeman, an ex-Marine and a confirmed hawk. When O’Brien read the proposed speech, he was “appalled.”

  On the night before the speech about a dozen advisers met with Humphrey in Salt Lake. The two key spokesmen were O’Brien, who demanded a separation from Johnson and a dovish position, and Jim Rowe, LBJ’s old friend, who insisted that Humphrey remain loyal to the President. The argument was intense and bitter and dragged on for hours. One of the doves said, “You have an image of not being your own man, not having guts.” Humphrey exploded:

  I am sick and tired of hearing this. I am insulted. I have guts. I am my own man. Nobody can question my loyalty to Lyndon Johnson, but nobody can question my ability to be President. I’ve listened to the Gene McCarthys say that I’m gutless. I’m not going to listen to any more from you people. … Give me a pad. I’m going to write this damn speech myself.

  Humphrey proceeded to scribble, reading as he went along, and in this process drafted his speech. At 4 a.m. O’Brien got up to leave and he and the Vice President exchanged silent smiles.

  Just before Humphrey went on the air, George Ball, who had resigned as U.N. ambassador and was helping Humphrey with the drafting, read the speech to the President. He expected an explosion. Instead, JBJ said, “Well, George, nobody’s better than you in explaining things to the press and I know you’ll be able to persuade them that this doesn’t mark any change in the Vice President’s position from the line we’ve all been following.” “I’m sorry, Mr. President,” Ball said, “but that’s not quite the name of the game.” “Well, George,” Johnson said, “I know you’ll do the best you can.”

  The key passage in Humphrey’s Salt Lake City speech read as follows:

  As President, I would stop the bombing of the North as an acceptable risk for peace because I believe it could lead to success in the negotiations and thereby shorten the war. This would be the best protection for our troops.—In weighing that risk—and before taking action—I would place key importance on evidence—direct or indirect—by deed or word—of Communist willingness to restore the demilitarized zone between North and South Vietnam.

  Now if the Government of North Vietnam were to show bad faith, I would reserve the right to resume the bombing.

  Was there a difference between the plank in the Democratic platform and the Salt Lake City speech? Ball called the latter “fuzzy” and “pettifogging.” O’Brien said the language quoted “is not that exciting … with its share of qualifiers.” Clark Clifford wrote that Humphrey had made a “cautious proposal … not very different from the Administration’s bargaining position.”

  But that was not the public’s perception, which read the address as a clean break with Johnson. On the plane ride to a speech in North Carolina there was an enthusiastic wire from Teddy Kennedy. Terry Sanford and the others who greeted them at the airport were, O’Brien said, “just, glowing. … There was a big and enthusiastic crowd … and, for the first time, no hecklers.” Given his own doubt about the language, O’Brien could not understand it. Maybe the power of television. But “it was the turning point.”

  Now, finally, the Humphrey campaign was on the road. But it was flat broke. This was critical because of TV time. Humphrey’s managers did everything they could to get Nixon to debate with Humphrey, or, at least, allow Agnew to debate Muskie. Having been burned badly by Kennedy in 1960, Nixon refused. Both Republican candidates were vulnerable and O’Brien had a group of powerful TV spots (example: a heartbeat slowly crossing the screen with the caption reading, “Spiro Agnew, A Heartbeat from the Presidency”). But the $6 million needed was unavailable.

  The oil industry offered Humphrey the money if he promised to keep the depletion allowance. He refused immediately. The textile interests made a similar proposal and received the same answer. “Hubert,” O’Brien said, “had a tendency to react from the gut and dismiss from his mind the fact that we’re broke, which was admirable.” Johnson controlled a private account of $600,000 in the President’s Club, which he did not release for the campaign. O’Brien thought that Johnson made this decision because he was upset with the Salt Lake City speech. />
  In desperation, Humphrey in October asked his old and very rich friend Duane Andreas to invite about a dozen millionaires to lunch at his apartment at the Waldorf in New York. O’Brien presented the problem. Would they lend the Humphrey campaign $3 million to put on half their TV spots? Though these moneybags did not expect to be repaid, they agreed to make the loan, and there was limited television coverage in the last three weeks of the campaign.

  Now there was other good news. Muskie turned out to be a superb campaigner with very high ratings in the polls. The contrast with Agnew, who was a flop, was dramatic. The Democrats put Humphrey and Muskie on together.

  Early on Wallace made important inroads into the hard-hat community in the northern industrial towns. Humphrey, with his strong labor record, attacked him forcefully. More important, the labor movement raised the largest campaign fund in its history for a massive attack on Wallace for being against the working man—125 million pamphlets, 100,000 door-to-door canvassers, 4 million phone calls. It was extremely effective.

  By the closing days of the campaign Humphrey had narrowed the race to a couple of points. On the day before the election Harris actually had him ahead of Nixon 43 to 40. Humphrey got last-minute support from several surprising sources. McCarthy on October 28 ended his long silence and endorsed his fellow Minnesotan. On October 31 the President in a television address ordered a halt in the bombing of North Vietnam allegedly because of positive developments in the Paris negotiations. On November 3 Johnson and Humphrey appeared together at the Houston Astrodome as the President endorsed the Vice President and Humphrey proceeded to carry Texas in the election.

  But on the most important issue that arose in the closing days of the campaign Johnson did nothing to help Humphrey. Clark Clifford had become deeply concerned about the Johnson-Nixon relationship on July 24, 1968, when the President told him, “I want to sit down with Mr. Nixon. … He may prove to be more responsible than the Democrats. … The GOP may be of more help to us than the Democrats in the next few months.” As already noted, they did “sit down” at the ranch on August 10. Nixon said that as long as the President did not “soften” his position on Vietnam, he would not criticize the administration. Clifford wrote, “I was as appalled as the President was pleased.” Nixon’s plan was to “offer us his support in return for inflexibility in our negotiating position and thereby freeze poor Hubert out in the cold. … Nixon has outmaneuvered the President. … Nixon is trying to hang the war so tightly around the Democrats’ neck that it can’t be loosened.”

  From the inception of the Paris meetings the North Vietnamese had refused to meet with the South Vietnamese, charging that they were “puppets” of the Americans who had no right to speak for the Vietnamese people. This had prevented any negotiations and had frustrated Harriman and Cyrus Vance, who had recently joined Harriman. On October 11 they asked the Americans whether the U.S. would stop the bombing if they agreed to Saigon’s participation in the talks. The next day Henry Kissinger, who had contacts with both the Republicans and the Democrats, informed John Mitchell, Nixon’s campaign manager, that there was the probability that Johnson would bring the bombing to a halt before the election. Washington instructed Ambassador Bunker and General Abrams to ask the South Vietnamese government if it would agree to stop the bombing if Hanoi offered to respect the DMZ, to stop shelling cities, and to agree to serious talks with the participation of Saigon. On October 13 Bunker cabled that General Thieu agreed to these terms on the condition that the bombing would resume if Hanoi violated the agreement. Washington accepted this as a commitment. Later Clifford wondered whether Bunker was congenitally optimistic; he knew that Thieu’s English, in which the discourse was conducted, was hardly fluent. If Thieu had in fact made an oral agreement, he quickly reversed himself. It soon became evident that the South Vietnamese would not agree to participate in the talks prior to the elections or, for that matter, during the presidency of Lyndon Johnson.

  By mid-October, as the presidential race narrowed, Nixon began to fret. Stephen Ambrose put it this way:

  If Johnson could pull off a bombing halt, get Hanoi to a peace table with promises to behave, bring the GVN [Saigon] into the talks, make it appear that a coalition government was about to be formed, and be able to claim that peace and reconciliation were just around the corner, why then Humphrey, already closing fast, would be a sure winner.

  Nixon said publicly, “We do not want to play politics with peace.” But that is exactly what he proceeded to do by convincing Thieu to refuse to participate in Paris. Clifford called it “a plot—there is no other word for it—to help Nixon win the election by a flagrant interference in the negotiations.”

  Nixon’s agent was Anna Chan Chennault, the Chinese widow of World War II hero General Claire Chennault, who had headed the Flying Tigers. Her credentials for this role were impeccable. She was president of Flying Tiger Airlines, spent a good deal of time in Asia, was active in the China Lobby, was cochair of Republican Women for Nixon, had raised $250,000 for his campaign, and was a friend of Thieu. She was also a buddy of Bui Diem, the South Vietnamese ambassador to Washington.

  About July 12, 1968, Nixon and Mitchell met with Chennault and Bui Diem at Nixon’s apartment in New York. Nixon directed Chennault to be his channel via Bui Diem to Thieu. Some time later Nixon informed Thieu by this means that, if he refused to send an envoy to Paris, he would get a much better deal for himself and South Vietnam after the election from Nixon than from Humphrey.

  It is hard to believe that Thieu could not have worked this out for himself since it was widely assumed that Humphrey, if he won, would drive hard for peace in Vietnam. “The GVN,” Ambrose wrote, “was a government without a country or a people. Its sole support was the U.S. government. Its sole raison d’être was the war. For the GVN to agree to peace would be to sign its own death warrant.” On November 2 Thieu announced publicly what he had already told the Americans: He would not participate in the Paris talks and he would not negotiate with the Vietcong.

  The White House was fully aware of Nixon’s plot and the complicity of Anna Chennault and Bui Diem. “The information,” Clifford wrote, “had been derived from extremely sensitive intelligence-gathering operations of the FBI, the CIA, and the National Security Agency; these included surveillance of the Ambassador of our ally, and an American citizen with strong political ties to the Republicans.” This confirmed the fact that Nixon “went far beyond the bounds of justifiable political combat.” It was “direct interference in the activities of the executive branch and the responsibilities of the Chief Executive, the only people with authority to negotiate on behalf of the nation.” Nixon had perpetrated “gross, even potentially illegal, interference in the security affairs of the nation by private individuals.”

  What would Johnson do with this extraordinary story? In reaching his decision, he conferred with Clifford, Rusk, and Rostow. According to Clifford, there were several peripheral considerations, none important enough to tip his hand. Clifford wrote,

  Finally, and most important, there was the question of President Johnson’s feelings about Hubert Humphrey. Throughout the campaign, the President treated his Vice President badly, excluding him from National Security Council meetings, and threatening to break with him over the platform plank on Vietnam. What mattered to President Johnson at that moment was not who would succeed him, but what his place in history would be. [emphasis mine]

  Five days before the election Johnson phoned Jim Rowe with Humphrey’s campaign in Peoria, Illinois. He told Rowe that he knew about the Chennault channel from Nixon to Thieu. He said, “I just want Humphrey to know about it. Tell him about it, and tell him I don’t think he ought to do anything about it. But that’s his problem.” Rowe’s law partner Tommy Corcoran knew Anna Chennault very well. Rowe asked, “Do you want me to get Tommy to pull her off?” Johnson said, “It’s too late.” Rowe informed Humphrey. Shortly, William L. Bundy gave Humphrey the details of the intercepts and wiretaps that confirmed C
hennault’s undercover activities. But Humphrey declined to attack Nixon, believing that even Nixon would not have stooped so low. “Whatever the vice president’s instincts,” Carl Solberg wrote, “they certainly did not include the instinct for the jugular.”

  On November 3, two days before the election, the President phoned Nixon and revealed his knowledge of the Chennault channel. Nixon, Bundy wrote, “categorically denied any connection or knowledge.” This was a bald-faced lie.

  A public denunciation of Nixon for establishing the Chennault connection would, obviously, have come with much greater authority from the President than from the Vice President. But Johnson kept the story secret.

  Clifford thought that Johnson’s failure to act denied Humphrey victory in the election. William Safire, who worked for Nixon on the campaign, wrote, “When people later wondered why Nixon thought so highly of President Thieu, they did not recall that Nixon probably would not be President were it not for Thieu. Nixon remembered.” “Had the accusation of meddling in the peace talks taken hold,” Jules Witcover wrote, “it could have swung to Humphrey this election that now was a cliff-hanger.” There is no doubt that a Johnson exposure and denunciation of Nixon would have given Humphrey a boost, probably a substantial one. As will be noted shortly, it would have taken very little to put Humphrey over the top.

  The fact that Johnson would base so critical a decision on his own place in history reveals a great deal about him. It is, obviously, evidence of his enormous, insatiable ego. Further, it was exceptionally bad judgment even if one makes the ridiculous assumption that the pivot was his own place in history. With the hindsight of history, we now know that Lyndon Johnson is ranked very low among American Presidents. This is in the face of his enormous achievements in domestic affairs. He certainly would not have been esteemed less by historians if he had helped Humphrey defeat Nixon. On the contrary, it would have raised his position.