The Wars of Watergate

by Stanley I. Kutler

  The Gulf of Tonkin incident, early in August 1964, and Johnson’s subsequent dealings with Congress, eventually shaped that image of deception more than any other event of his presidency. The congressional resolution authorizing Johnson to retaliate against North Vietnamese attacks never escaped the smell of presidential duplicity. Whether Johnson used the occasion to fulfill longstanding plans for wider American involvement in the war, as Senator J. William Fulbright later believed, or whether the resolution resulted from the President’s fear that Goldwater and the Right would preempt him on the issue of standing up to Communism—or both—the Tonkin Gulf Resolution was a watershed not only for the Vietnam war but for the relationship between the executive and legislative branches for the next decade.10

  What happened in the Tonkin Gulf on the nights of August 2 and 4 remains to this day somewhat cloudy. What is certain is that the Administration neither fully understood what had occurred nor reported the “incidents” fairly and fully. In January, Johnson had approved military plans for covert activities against North Vietnam—“dirty tricks,” as they were known. By early summer, these operations increased as South Vietnamese resistance deteriorated.

  On the night of August 2, three Vietnamese PT boats attacked the American destroyer Maddox. The destroyer sank one. Intercepts of enemy radio traffic showed that the North believed the Americans had coordinated action with the South Vietnamese. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara later testified that the incident occurred thirty miles out to sea, when in fact the vessels had been only thirteen miles from shore. McNamara also denied any coordination, insisting that Maddox had been on a routine patrol mission. For the moment, Johnson and his advisers decided not to escalate the action but vowed to maintain naval operations in the Gulf despite warnings from the naval commander on the scene that they constituted “an unacceptable risk.” The Pentagon ordered Maddox and another destroyer, C. Turner Joy, back into action on August 3. The next night, the commander radioed that North Vietnamese intercepts showed that the enemy believed the destroyers were preparing to attack their bases. Again, what happened is in dispute. The destroyers signaled that enemy boats were attacking; whether they had been sighted on radar or had actually attacked remains in question. No matter, the President left no doubt of his resolve to retaliate.

  But Johnson needed congressional acquiescence—for political, hardly constitutional, reasons. The pressures of the pending election, combined with his innate political caution, dictated that he seek congressional cooperation. By the evening of August 4, Johnson had secured promises of support from the leadership for both retaliation and a resolution authorizing executive initiatives. And that night, carrier-based aircraft attacked North Vietnamese naval stations and an oil depot on the Gulf, even while Pentagon wireless operators were still seeking details of the attacks on the American destroyers.

  Johnson prevailed on his Senate friends to secure the necessary resolution. Fulbright, Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, steered the measure through—to his eventual regret. The Senator persuaded himself that the resolution would fend off Goldwater’s hawkish appeals and that a limited American military response would set the stage for serious negotiations between the warring Vietnamese parties and the United States. Years later, Fulbright realized that Johnson had ordered the destroyers back into action to provoke an “ ‘excuse’ which would allow him to retaliate militarily and, later, to play upon the ‘chauvinism’ of the Congress.”11

  Senator Gaylord Nelson (D–WI) pressed Fulbright the hardest. Nelson urged his colleagues to accept an amendment limiting the American role in Vietnam to “aid, training assistance, and military advice.” Fulbright told Nelson that he agreed with the sentiment and was confident that the President shared the same view. But, responding to Johnson’s prodding, Fulbright went on to say that amendments would only complicate the congressional process and send the wrong message to Hanoi. The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, he insisted, was “harmless”; privately, he told colleagues that it offered the best opportunity “to pull the rug out from under Goldwater.” Only Senators Wayne Morse (D–OR) and Ernest Gruening (D–AK) resisted Fulbright’s pleadings. Strangely, as the nation turned against the war in 1968, both were defeated and shunned as the proverbial messengers of bad tidings. (Meanwhile, Johnson ordered the FBI to investigate Morse’s Oregon supporters.) That same year, Fulbright’s committee staff amassed damning evidence of the Administration’s duplicity. But as George Ball later noted, “if it wasn’t Tonkin Gulf, it would have been something else.”12

  Johnson carried the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in his pocket, readily showing it to visitors who questioned his policies. He treated it as a blank check for congressional support, although Congress’s support was not unlimited, and in time, Johnson and the presidency paid high interest for its use. The Gulf of Tonkin incident and its aftermath planted the seeds for a decade of discord and estrangement between the presidency and Congress over Vietnam policy.

  Johnson’s smashing victory in 1964 swept a swollen Democratic majority into control of Congress. The Democrats gained 37 seats in the House of Representatives, giving them a 295–140 majority. In the Senate, with a 68–32 margin, the Democrats had nearly the same proportional control. The previous Congress had given the President much of what he had asked for in response to his considerable bargaining skills and out of sympathy for the martyred Kennedy. But this was very much Johnson’s Congress. Many newly elected representatives came from districts which were only marginally Democratic, or which Republicans had lost because of Goldwater’s liabilities. These representatives (many of whom served only one term) naturally looked to Johnson for leadership and guidance. He provided both in abundance.

  Washington had seen nothing like it since the Hundred Days of the New Deal. “Johnson’s Congress” compiled a staggering legislative record. The sweeping, almost revolutionary, Voting Rights Act and the long-sought Medicare program headed the list. Congress also created the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, the new Department of Housing and Urban Development, and the Arms Control Agency. It passed clean-air, clean-water, and highway-beautification measures to preserve the environment. It allocated new and enlarged grants for federal research on heart disease, cancer, and stroke, as well as a raft of new programs for the President’s “War on Poverty,” including provisions for rent subsidies, manpower training, and Operation Head Start.

  Ironically, however, as the President fulfilled the leading items on the liberal agenda, much of the liberal coalition began to desert him. The year after his sweeping victory, 1965, was an ambivalent period. The President’s legislative achievements deserved admiration, yet discordant notes filled the air. The summer witnessed outbreaks of violence in the black urban ghettos. Campus protests blossomed, questioning what had seemed to be sacred values of educational authority. Sappers penetrated the American Embassy in Saigon, protesters publicly burned draft cards, and that winter saw the first organized antiwar rally in Washington. By December, air strikes over North Vietnam had become routine, dropping tons of bombs—and yet they seemed only to strengthen the enemy’s resolve. By the end of the year, 200,000 Americans were in Vietnam.

  Polls consistently reflected a widespread dislike for Johnson. Critics complained about his “lack of style,” notwithstanding a grudging respect for his achievements. But Johnson damaged himself by his actions more than by his manner. First, the war had escalated dramatically. The retaliatory raids had developed into a full-scale air war on the North, designed, as General Curtis LeMay said, to bomb it “back to the Stone Age.” Marines landed at Danang in March 1965, allegedly to protect American planes and pilots but actually with combat orders. Johnson was now haunted by his promises not to send American boys to fight Asian wars, and their false notes heightened the latent suspicions of his style and character. The heady successes of the 1964 election and in Congress afterward magnified those perceived traits of wheeling and dealing, deception, and furtive
ness that clung to the President’s reputation like barnacles.

  The notion of a “credibility gap” in the Administration symbolized the growing unease. In a speech at Johns Hopkins University on April 7, 1965, the President called for “unconditional discussions” for peace and outlined a scheme for a TVA-type development project for the Mekong River valley in Southeast Asia. Typically, a flurry of activity followed the speech to offer an impression of reality. Johnson pressured World Bank President Eugene Black to head the project and promised him full support and a blue-ribbon panel to help implement the scheme. It never happened: no project, no panel, no support. Six weeks later, David Wise described the President’s “credibility gap.”13 Johnson’s tall Texas tales—that his grandfather fought at the Alamo, for example—no longer amused; instead, they appeared as part of a dangerous pattern underlining the reality that Johnson would not—or could not—tell the truth.

  Johnson ordered his doctor to say that he drank only bourbon (a good American drink) when Washington circles knew he favored Scotch. He justified military intervention in the Dominican Republic by insisting that the rebels had beheaded people and that the American ambassador had been fired upon—none of which was true. Secrecy abounded regarding presidential nominations, budgets, travel plans, and programs. The President thus assured the limelight for himself, as only he could announce or authorize what was to be. If the press discovered a pending presidential appointment, Johnson sometimes would reverse his plans out of what seemed to many to be sheer perversity. The dean of Washington columnists, Arthur Krock, charged the President with “evasive rhetoric” whenever he escalated the war. One writer, who elaborated on the credibility gap and described Johnson as “one of the ablest Presidents this country has produced,” said that Johnson could be even better “if he would stop getting wounded every time a reporter or editorial writer takes issue with him on some point.” Johnson’s actions and thin-skinned reactions only widened the chasm between himself and the press.14

  At the outset of his administration, Johnson had ostentatiously cultivated the press, hoping to emulate Kennedy’s success with reporters. He dispatched a special plane to bring James Reston of the New York Times to the President’s ranch on Christmas 1963. He bragged about having columnist Walter Lippmann to dinner. But when Lippmann turned hostile toward the Vietnam adventure, the President pointed to his repeated errors and delighted in salacious jokes about him. Other journalists described it as “the war on Walter Lippmann.” After the President courted reporters with a high-speed drive across his ranchlands, he became infuriated when they wrote about the adventure, including a description of Johnson sipping a cup of beer while driving. Johnson craved personal attention, and then objected when press accounts depicted his behavior as grotesque or undesirable.15

  Johnson’s war policies and his reactions to his critics generated geometric leaps in the form and intensity of the opposition. American presidents, Washington and Lincoln included, have rarely been immune from vicious, mean-spirited criticism. But the fury against Johnson seemed unprecedented. English journalist Henry Fairlie was appalled: “I have found nothing more strange than the way in which American intellectuals take pleasure in reviling President Johnson.” He could not understand their “fastidious disdain for the man,… a slob,” as someone described him to Fairlie. Cartoonists had a field day depicting the Gargantua-like figure, with his homeliest features heavily exaggerated. The biting, even cruel, satirical play MacBird was a favorite on elite campuses.16

  The net result of his bad press was that Johnson responded with an equal measure of contempt. Worse, he retreated into an ever-shrinking shell of friends and advisers in the White House. Unwilling to confront hostile receptions, he became a virtual prisoner in Washington, increasingly under siege. Johnson’s seclusion was ominous. Even at the nadir of his popularity, Harry Truman still moved freely about Washington, taking his morning walk down Pennsylvania Avenue, accompanied only by a few Secret Service agents. Aides urged President Johnson to travel, believing he could generate a counterwave of sympathy. Reportedly, the Secret Service and Johnson himself rejected the advice.17

  American presidents in the twentieth century have generally had good relations with the press. Within that relationship, however, presidents consistently have tried to manage the reporting of their administrations. And although the relationship of press and president is inherently adversarial, it usually has been governed by mutual respect and trust. All that changed dramatically with Lyndon Johnson. Betraying his typical frustration, he once lashed out at the press: “Somebody ought to do an article on you, on your damn profession, your First Amendment.” Perhaps he could not understand the media. He certainly could not control them as he would have liked. “[A]ll you guys in the media. All of politics has changed because of you,” he lamented.18 The media, in other words, set the agenda and, for that reason, they were fair game for Johnson’s manipulation—if he could manipulate them.

  At the end of his administration, Johnson touched on the disastrous state of affairs between himself and the press. He acknowledged that a presidential relationship with the media inevitably would be like a “lover’s quarrel,” but one that nevertheless was healthy so long as both sides acted with “respect for each other’s purposes.” Johnson realized what had happened during his tenure: “I would be less than candid if I failed to say that I am troubled by the difficulties of communicating with and through the press.”

  It must have galled Johnson and his aides to compare their media relations to his predecessor’s. When Kennedy was accused of “news management,” Press Secretary Pierre Salinger candidly defended the practice on both national-security and self-interest grounds. Editorial reaction was sharp and pointed, yet Kennedy maintained extremely cordial and close relations with the press. One Johnson assistant envied and resented Kennedy’s success. Johnson had “no physical glamour to carry him through when the news was bad. He was a high-pressure salesman,” Harry McPherson wrote, “always trying to get his foot in the door, frequently arousing—in professionally skeptical men who had spent their working lives listening to the apologies of politicians—an incredible resistance.”19

  The ever-growing hostility alarmed and saddened some reporters. The New York Times’s White House correspondent, Max Frankel, told the President’s Press Secretary that it was “most painful for me to see my President being cut up.” Frankel complained that Johnson and his staff had fostered the bitterness, but he also acknowledged that both sides had lavished excessive attention “on the most petty aspects of policy and personality.” Why, he said, “must we all punish each other so strenuously on things that don’t [count]?” UPI’s White House correspondent, Merriman Smith, whose son had been killed in Vietnam, told his colleagues that Johnson was “the object of some of the worst vilification—even obscenity—that I’ve seen or heard in more than 25 years on the White House assignment.”20

  The problem was serious, and went beyond simple matters of personal tastes and preferences. The credibility of the President—and, in effect, of the United States government—was on the line. The battles with the press, George Reedy noted, became battles with important segments of the public. The distrust and vilification both impaired the President’s standing and confirmed many prevailing negative images of his leadership. The President worried that the attacks only weakened his hand abroad. “Why should Ho Chi Minh believe me when the newspapers and the broadcasters in my own country won’t believe me?” he asked one correspondent. Perhaps there was a touch of paranoia in that statement, and yet it had a certain painful truth.21 The circle was vicious—for the President, the presidency, the press, and the national interest.

  Johnson’s well-worn habits of secrecy produced the appearance and reflected the actual practice of deception. His efforts to conceal his thoughts and intentions only incensed an increasingly hostile media and further weakened his public standing. Secrecy was his familiar means of control. He told reporters during the 1964 ca
mpaign that “if you play along with me, I’ll play along with you.… If you want to play it the other way, I know how to play it both ways, too, and I know how to cut off the flow of news.” Ironically, as a sympathetic observer noted, “the very qualities and experiences that had led to his political and legislative success were precisely those that now operated to destroy him.”22 He was accustomed to resolving conflict; tolerating it was totally alien to him. The problem was that Lyndon Johnson was no longer operating in the friendly, close confines of the United States Senate.

  The Vietnam war seared the Johnson Administration and scarred American society for decades. The war neither started with Johnson—as he ceaselessly reminded the nation, invoking the venerated Eisenhower and the martyred Kennedy as the war’s patron saints—nor ended with him. “I didn’t get us into Vietnam. I didn’t ring up out there and say, ‘I want some trouble,’ ” he told a campaign audience in Louisville in 1964.23 But Johnson wove the war inextricably into the fabric of American politics and society. The Vietnam venture raised fundamental questions about the course of American foreign policy; eventually, however, those questions spilled over into more basic domestic considerations of presidential authority and power. The result was a politics of turmoil and upheaval that did not abate for nearly a decade and witnessed the unexpected departures of two presidents.

  In retrospect, Johnson complained that “that bitch of a war” took him away from “the woman I really loved”—his Great Society. The war ruptured the nation, sparking unprecedented anger and resistance to government policies. The President and his advisers, however, stuck to their chosen position, determined to justify the conflict as a defense of the national interest. In the end, however, both success abroad and consensus at home eluded them. Demoralized, even a bit bewildered, Johnson said in 1968 that the only difference between Kennedy’s assassination and his was that he was “alive and it has been more torturous.” The war “cut the arteries of the LBJ administration,” wrote a sympathetic aide. It nearly cut the nation’s as well.24