In fact, Johnson did not even stop to catch his breath at the close of the first session of the triumphant 89th Congress. Majority Leader Mansfield, noted for good judgment, recommended a slowdown, taking time for digestion, and concentrating on the administration of the laws that had already been enacted. Many newspapers and magazines sang the same chorus. White House aide Harry McPherson pointed out that congressional investigations would expose much “confusion, duplication, and waste.” He recommended that the President beat Congress to the punch by naming Charles Schultze to head an administration investigating commission on the implementation of the new laws. McPherson also suggested a major campaign to explain them to the public.
But Johnson, driven by his need to surpass Roosevelt, would hear none of this sensible advice. There was still room over his fireplace for new coon-skins and he intended to get them. The progress of a bill, Doris Kearns wrote, was “the center of Johnson’s life, and the ceremony of successful completion was also a personal celebration. … The ceremonies were also a public forum in which Johnson bestowed upon the nation his most valued creation—the laws of the Great Society. The ceremony was also a summons to the next series of legislative endeavors.” “He adopts programs,” Califano wrote, “the way a child eats chocolate-chip cookies.” Califano took his son to the hospital after the boy swallowed a full bottle of aspirin. The President tracked him down there and listened to the account. “There ought to be a law,” Johnson said, “that makes druggists use safe containers.” This led eventually to passage of the Child Safety Act of 1970.
On October 22, 1965, when Congress adjourned, the President wrote a long letter to Mansfield. After thanking the majority leader for playing a major part in “the first session of the 89th Congress [that] will go down in history as the greatest session … in the history of our Nation,” he pointed to the job left still to be done: “23 major items of legislation, recommended by the Administration, which the Congress did not enact.” There was also a batch of budget questions. Johnson sent Califano out to several major universities to dig out legislative ideas and instructed him to establish task forces to flesh them out. For Lyndon Johnson, 1966 would be like 1965, 1967 like 1966, and so on. In his mind, evidently, there were no changes under way in the conditions that he and the Congress would face. He could not have been more wrong.2
Lyndon Johnson Americanized the Vietnam War in mid-1965. The conflict would continue until January 27, 1973, almost eight years, when Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho negotiated a cease-fire. This armistice, not a peace treaty, provided for the withdrawal of the few remaining American troops, a prisoner exchange, and related military matters, leaving the fundamental question, the political future of South Vietnam, unresolved. The North Vietnamese gave the answer in the spring of 1975 with a quick offensive that destroyed South Vietnam’s military forces and culminated in the capture of Saigon. The seemingly interminable war came to an end because Vietnam was united. Ho Chi Minh was now dead, but his followers had won the war he had started.
Did the United States lose the war? Colonel Harry G. Summers, Jr., called the result “tactical victory, strategic retreat.” He wrote, “On the battlefield itself, the Army was unbeatable. … Yet, in the end, it was North Vietnam, not the United States, that emerged victorious.” Thomas C. Thayer wrote, “The Americans couldn’t win in Vietnam but they couldn’t lose either as long as they stayed.” Stanley Karnow put it this way:
In human terms at least, the war in Vietnam was a war that nobody won—a struggle between victims. Its origins were complex, its lessons disputed, its legacy still to be assessed by future generations. But whether a valid venture or a misguided endeavor, it was a tragedy of epic dimensions.
That epic tragedy included the costs the Vietnam War imposed on the American people. They were stupendous and are suggested by the following analysis.
The war exacted a terrible human toll on the 3.5 million Americans who served in Vietnam. As of March 1973, some 57,625 U.S. troops had died, 47,205 in combat and 10,420 otherwise. In addition, 153,312 had been wounded or injured and required hospitalization; another 150,341 had been wounded or injured and were not hospitalized. Further, 3,592 were missing and 750 had been captured. Soldiers and marines fighting on the ground suffered 88 percent of combat deaths and 90 percent were enlisted men. Some 12 percent of those who died in combat were black. When the Vietnam Memorial was opened in Washington in November 1982, it listed the names of almost 58,000 men and women who had been killed or were missing in action in Vietnam. Among those not listed were a large number of amputees and paraplegics. About 6,655 persons lost limbs during the war.
The most melancholy cost of the war was that of combat veterans who survived only to suffer from severe, chronic post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The rigorous National Vietnam Veterans Readjustment Study made in the late eighties, twenty years after the war, revealed that 36 percent of combat veterans met the full American Psychiatric Association diagnostic criteria for PTSD. When Jonathan Shay published Achilles in Vietnam in 1994, there were more than 250,000 of them.
All of these men suffered from severe combat trauma, usually from sniper or mortar fire or from stepping on a land mine. Example from one of Dr. Shay’s patients:
I was walking point. I had seen this NVA soldier at a distance. … I stuck my head in the bush and saw this NVA hiding there and told him to come out. He started to move back and I saw he had one of those commando weapons, y’know, with a pistol grip under his thigh, and he brought it up and I was looking straight down the bore. I PULLED THE TRIGGER ON MY M-16 AND NOTHING HAPPENED. He fired and I felt this burning on my cheek. I don’t know what I did with the bolt of the 16, but I got it to fire, and I emptied everything I had into him. THEN I SAW BLOOD DRIPPING ON THE BACK OF MY HAND AND /just went crazy. I pulled him out into the paddy and carved him up with my knife. …
I lost all my mercy. … I just couldn’t get enough. … I built up such hate. I couldn’t do enough damage. …
Got worse as time went by. I really loved fucking killing, couldn’t get enough. For every one that I killed I felt better. Made some of the hurt went away.
Such experiences often cause PTSD, which clamps its grip on the soldier for the rest of his life. The common symptoms are formidable: loss of memory and perception; constant mobilization for lethal danger with the potential for extreme violence; chronic health problems; expectation of betrayal and exploitation by others; alcohol and drug abuse; despair, isolation, a sense of the meaninglessness of life; and a tendency to suicide.
The cost of PTSD, evidently, has not been estimated, but it must be enormous. The total would have to include at least the following costs over the victim’s lifetime: psychiatric care, medical care, hospitalization, and drugs; forfeited income because many of these men are unemployable; incarceration because a disproportionate number are in jail; and welfare support.
The total dollar cost of the Vietnam War was immense and will continue well into the twenty-first century. In 1976 Robert Warren Stevens, using studies then available, divided his global estimate of the cost into four components: (1) the incremental budget cost to the U.S. government during the years the war was fought, that is, excluding defense expenditures that would have been made if there had been no war, estimated at $128.4 billion, (2) budgetary costs, mainly veteran’s benefits, incurred since the end of the war that must be paid because it was fought, $304.8 billion, (3) extra-budgetary economic costs imposed by the war on the American economy, $70.7 billion, and (4) indirect economic costs attributable to the war, such as recession, inflation, loss of exports, $378 billion. These four groups of costs add up to the gigantic total of $882 billion.
Was the war worth this immense price in blood and treasure? Admiral James B. Stockdale, who spoke with special authority, gave the answer. As a naval fighter pilot he had led a group of planes over that part of the Gulf of Tonkin where two U.S. destroyers had allegedly been attacked on August 3, 1964, which gave Lyndon Johnson th
e pretext for his first giant step into the war, passage of the Tonkin Gulf resolution. Stockdale saw no North Vietnamese boats. He was later shot down, lost a leg, was tortured, and spent over seven years in a prisoner-of-war camp blindfolded. He did not see Vietnam until he returned in 1994. “I was surprised at how junky it looked. God, we were so dumb about it. Did we think of the lives we squandered on this dump?”
Robert Jay Lifton, the noted psychiatrist, celebrated the end of two wars in Times Square. On VE-Day in 1945 he was a medical student who joined a huge throng in a mood of “pure mass joy.” When Kissinger announced the standdown in Vietnam in 1973, the square was “seedy, almost deserted.” There were “a few Vietnam veterans gathered in anger, some drinking, others apparently on drugs, most simply enraged, screaming at the camera, at the society, about having been deceived by the war and ignored upon coming back.”
These veterans were bitter largely because they did not know why they had been sent to Vietnam. Nobody had told them. This was President Johnson’s job and he had failed to perform it. This must have been in part caused by his own inconsistency and dishonesty on the record. During the 1964 presidential campaign he repeatedly made the following point: “We don’t want our American boys to do the fighting for Asian boys. We don’t want to get involved in a nation with 700 million people [China] and get tied down in a land war in Asia.”
But in the first half of 1965 Johnson secretly reversed himself and on his own initiative led the United States into that war. He approved Rolling Thunder in February, the marine landing at Danang in March, and the commitment of major ground forces by July. Further, in April, his National Security Action Memorandum No. 328, after approving the troop commitments, stated: “The President desires that … premature publicity be avoided by all possible precautions.” His intent was that “these movements and changes be understood as being gradual and wholly consistent with existing policy.” How could the American people, including those who would serve in the war, understand a new policy that was being withheld from them? David Wise called 328 “one of the most shameful official documents of a shameful time in American history.”
Finally, on July 28, the President discussed publicly for the first time the military actions he had already authorized. This was as close as he came to a statement of his war aims in Vietnam. He offered the following arguments in defense of his actions: “Why,” he asked, “must young Americans, born into a land exultant with hope and with golden promise, toil and suffer and sometimes die in such a remote place?” Answer: “We have learned at a terrible and brutal cost that retreat does not bring safety and weakness does not bring peace.” This is an excellent question and a meaningless response.
Later Johnson says, “Nor would surrender in Viet-Nam bring peace, because we learned from Hitler at Munich that success only feeds the appetite of aggression.” In fact, neither South Vietnam nor the U.S. faced the prospect of surrender. The comparison of Ho’s North Vietnam to Hitler’s Germany is ludicrous. The Nazis commanded enormous military force and, as Johnson put it, North Vietnam was a sixth-rate power.
Ho’s goal, the President said, was to “conquer the South, to defeat American power, and to extend the Asiatic dominion of communism.” There are two disparate ideas here. Ho’s objective, obviously, was to unite Vietnam under his rule. If that required “conquest” of the South and the “defeat of American power,” North Vietnam had no alternative but to assume those burdens.
The other idea, extending the “Asiatic dominion of communism,” was, of course, the domino theory. If South Vietnam falls, Johnson said, “most of the non-communist nations of Asia cannot, by themselves and alone, resist the growing might and the grasping ambition of communism.” Eisenhower had introduced the domino metaphor in 1953 by warning that the loss of Vietnam would lead inexorably to the fall of Malaysia, other parts of Asia, and Indonesia. But it was a metaphor, not a description of reality. North Vietnam had given no sign of either the ambition or the capability to overrun other nations in Southeast Asia. In fact, in the seventies when it had united Vietnam it made no effort to do so. Nor did the other countries fear an invasion by North Vietnam. Neil Sheehan wrote, “There was, in fact, no international Communist conspiracy and no ‘Sino-Soviet bloc.’ The Communist world of the 1960s was a splintered world. The Chinese and the Soviets had openly despised each other for years.” So, too, had the Vietnamese and the Chinese, historic enemies. Sheehan continued, “Guerilla wars could not be spread like bacteria, and countries were not dominoes. They were living entities with national leaders who pursued their own agendas.”
Johnson then pointed out that “three Presidents—President Eisenhower, President Kennedy, and your present President—over 11 years have committed themselves and have promised to help defend this small and valiant nation.” On its face, this statement was factually correct. But there was a fundamental difference between the Eisenhower and Kennedy policies and the policy Johnson was now implementing. As moderate cold warriors, they had sent equipment, trainers, and advisers to South Vietnam. They had not bombed the North and they certainly had not launched a land war in Asia in defiance of traditional American military doctrine.
Finally, the President left a gaping omission: a strategy for victory. He did not tell the American people how the war would be won or how long it would take. No wonder that thereafter Johnson’s aides repeatedly urged him without success to present a credible justification for the war and that the troops in Southeast Asia never knew why they were there.
The absence of meaningful war aims contributed to a massive decline in national morale, which fed both the peace movement and the young men subject to the draft. Draft evasion became the great pastime of the period. Millions of young men went to college or graduate school or got married to avoid service. A great many simply ignored their draft cards and some even burned them. An important haven of escape was the reserves and the National Guard, which Johnson refused to call up. Only 15,000 went to Vietnam and nearly a million remained comfortably at home. A significant group of young men went into exile, particularly in Canada and Sweden. A generation later two prominent politicians were embarrassed by draft evasion—Republican Vice President Dan Quayle and Democratic President Bill Clinton.
The pointlessness of the war undermined the morale of the troops in Vietnam, particularly in the Army. This created rage and mindless killing both of innocent civilians, as at My Lai, and the “fragging” of officers. Drugs and alcohol were widely used and there was racial tension. This came to a head in 1971 with riots among the troops in Vietnam.
One of the great casualties of the war was the credibility of the government, particularly the presidency. Lyndon Johnson had never messed much with the truth and his style—Texas hype, an obsession with secrecy, and a gross misunderstanding of the press—led to massive lying about the war. “There was a certain inevitability,” David Wise wrote, “that the term ‘credibility gap’ should have been born during the Johnson administration.” Wise should know because he was White House correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune and his dispatch on May 23, 1965, contained probably the first use of the phrase. “It was a case where the man and the times fused.” Lying, particularly in wartime, was hardly a new feature of American politics. But, Wise noted, “nothing in our past had matched, in scale and quality, the grand deception of Vietnam.” Nixon, who confronted both the war and Watergate, was an even bigger liar than Johnson. Between them they undermined the credibility of American government for at least a generation.
Many of Johnson’s supporters recommended that he address his credibility problem. An example is a letter J. K. Galbraith wrote to Califano on December 16, 1966:
I would strongly urge the President to stamp very hard on this talk about credibility. And he should do it in the only possible way. This is to be particularly unvarnished in not only the good news but the bad. …
I would like to urge him to say flatly that we favor the equitable procedure of paying bills by ta
xation rather than by the inequitable and dangerous levy that is imposed by inflation. And I would also like to urge an equally flat statement that since personal incomes are now at an all time high, and are partly so in consequence of war spending, we can’t justify any argument for cutting back needed civilian expenditures because of the war.
I would urge the President to be equally candid and blunt on the problems that we face on foreign policy and notably on Vietnam. I think the ultimate response would be extremely favorable.
The President did not listen to such advice.
Johnson’s deceit, abetted by McNamara, as noted in Chapter 14, launched the Great Inflation. The rapid rise in prices was, in effect, a general sales tax on goods and services paid by Americans and those foreigners who imported our goods. Stevens estimated the inflation of gross national product for 1969–72 at $140 billion. It was much harder on those with fixed incomes than on those whose wages and salaries kept pace with advancing prices.
Perhaps most important, the great meat cleaver of the Vietnam War divided the country in a variety of ways. The conflict bitterly split those who favored it from those who opposed it, the old from the young, the well-educated from those who were poorly educated, most of the country from the South and the Southwest, and, most painfully, families. This did not end with the conclusion of hostilities in 1973; it was much in evidence a generation later. The war was the main cause for the great civil unrest that characterized the late sixties. The U.S. had not known such chaotic and violent division since the sectional conflict of the 1850s that led to the Civil War. The split was deep and venomous within Lyndon Johnson’s own Democratic party, particularly at the disastrous Chicago convention in 1968.
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