The Untold History of the United States

by Oliver Stone

  No one was angrier than Army Chief of Staff General Harold Johnson. Johnson put on his best dress uniform and set off to see the president. In the car ride over, he unpinned the stars from his shoulders. But before seeing the president he had a change of heart and pinned them back on—a decision he later regretted. He told one colleague, “I should have gone to see the president. I should have taken off my stars. I should have resigned. It was the worst, the most immoral decision I’ve ever made.”33

  From there on, troop deployments steadily escalated. Meanwhile, the NLF continued to make gains throughout the country.

  Not everyone supported sending combat troops. Clark Clifford tried repeatedly to convince Johnson and McNamara not to commit more troops, a position shared, at least privately, by Hubert Humphrey, Chester Bowles, William Bundy, George Ball, John Kenneth Galbraith, Assistant Secretary of Defense John McNaughton, NSC official Chester Cooper, White House Press Secretary Bill Moyers, and Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Adam Yarmolinsky.

  Johnson chose catastrophe over capitulation. But he did so gradually instead of all-out, as the Joint Chiefs wanted. Major Charles Cooper, an aide to Admiral David McDonald, the chief of naval operations, accompanied McDonald to a meeting of the Joint Chiefs in November 1965 at which General Wheeler expressed “serious misgivings” about the direction of the war and urged the use of “overwhelming naval and air power,” including mining Haiphong harbor, blockading the North Vietnamese coastline, and bombing the North, including Hanoi. The other chiefs assured Johnson that they endorsed Chairman Wheeler’s proposal. Cooper recalled Johnson’s response:

  Johnson exploded. . . . He just started screaming these obscenities. . . . It was something like: “You goddamn fucking assholes. You’re trying to get me to start World War III with your idiotic bullshit—your ‘military wisdom.’ ” He insulted each of them individually. “You dumb shit. Do you expect me to believe that kind of crap? I’ve got the weight of the Free World on my shoulders and you want me to start World War III?” He called them shitheads and pompous assholes and used the f-word more freely than a marine in boot camp. He really degraded them and cursed at them. Then he stopped and went back to a calm voice. . . . “Imagine that you’re me—that you’re the president of the United States—and five incompetents come into your office and try to talk you into starting World War III. . . . What would you do?” General Wheeler said: I can’t do it, Mr. President. . . . It’s got to be your decision and yours alone.” . . . Johnson erupted again. “The risk is just too high. How can you fucking assholes ignore what China might do? You have just contaminated my office, you filthy shitheads. Get the hell out of here right now.”

  “I know memories are usually dimmed by time,” Cooper assured his interviewer, “but not this one. My memory of Lyndon Johnson on that day is crystal clear.”34

  The United States gradually increased its bombing of the North, expanding the list of targets to heighten pressure on Hanoi. Responding to his advisors’ concerns about provoking China, Johnson believed this gradual approach would limit the possibility of Chinese entry into the war. He reasoned that

  the slow escalation of the air war in the North and the increasing pressure on Ho Chi Minh was seduction, not rape. If China should suddenly react to slow escalation, as a woman might react to attempted seduction, by threatening to retaliate (a slap in the face, to continue the metaphor), the United States would have plenty of time to ease off the bombing. On the other hand, if the United States were to unleash an all-out, total assault on the North—rape rather than seduction—there could be no turning back, and Chinese reaction might be instant and total.35

  When Senator George McGovern warned that the bombing might provoke strong responses by both the Chinese and North Vietnamese, Johnson responded, “I’m watching that very closely. I’m going up her leg an inch at a time. . . . I’ll get to the snatch before they know what’s happening.”36

  U.S. bombing sparked protests around the world. In March 1965, students and faculty held an all-night teach-in at the University of Michigan. The following month, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) held an antiwar demonstration in Washington, D.C., at which an astounding 25,000 people showed up.

  Convinced that Communist governments were behind the nascent antiwar movement, the CIA began a massive surveillance and information-gathering effort against antiwar activists. Johnson demanded the CIA uncover proof of Communist involvement. The CIA’s illegal domestic surveillance operation, code-named Chaos, was run by a newly created Special Operations Group. It lasted almost seven years, compiling a computer index of 300,000 citizens and organizations and extensive files on 7,200 individuals.37 Johnson nevertheless berated CIA Director Richard Helms for failing to prove Communist involvement.

  Among the FBI’s principal targets was Nobel Peace Prize winner Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who labeled the U.S. government “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.”38

  Top administration officials, including McNamara, began voicing their own doubts. In August 1966, McNamara asked the CIA for an estimate of the enemy forces and had his aide Leslie Gelb oversee the compiling of the top secret history of the war since 1954 that came to be known as the Pentagon Papers. When McNamara later began reading the report, he told a friend, “You know they could hang people for what’s in there.”39 He conveyed his growing doubts to the president and, in August 1967, provoked Johnson’s ire by telling a Senate committee that bombing the North would not bring Hanoi to the negotiating table. Johnson would not stand insubordination. “I don’t want loyalty. I want loyalty,” he said of one aide. “I want him to kiss my ass in Macy’s window at high noon and tell me it smells like roses. I want his pecker in my pocket.”40 In November, Johnson announced that McNamara had been appointed to head the World Bank. The news came as a surprise to the now former secretary of defense.

  Peter Kuznick speaking at an antiwar rally on the campus of Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. As stories of atrocities in Vietnam reached the United States, the antiwar movement continued to grow.

  In 1967, Oliver Stone (center) enlisted in the U.S. Army and volunteered for combat duty in Vietnam, where he served for fifteen months and was wounded twice. He was awarded a Bronze Star for combat gallantry and a Purple Heart with an Oak Leaf Cluster.

  A visibly upset Johnson with McNamara during a Cabinet Room meeting in February 1968. After McNamara drew the president’s ire by expressing doubts about the war, Johnson surprised McNamara by appointing him to head the World Bank.

  By that point, most of the old Kennedy team was gone, as Johnson’s foreign policy had moved sharply to the right. Robert Kennedy had left long before. McGeorge Bundy departed in 1966 to head the Ford Foundation. The comparatively colorless Dean Rusk, however, persevered. Johnson let Rusk play a much bigger role than he had under Kennedy, but Johnson had low regard for the State Department bureaucracy. He told J. Edgar Hoover that State officials were “a bunch of sissy fellows” who were “not worth a damn.”41 Rusk regularly offered his resignation, including in the summer of 1967, when he informed Johnson that his daughter was marrying a black man. But he stuck with Johnson to the bitter end, never wavering in his support for the war.

  Although Rusk may have met Johnson’s standards of loyalty, growing numbers of Americans had had enough of his vicious war and its distorting impact on American society. Black America was in a state of near rebellion. Rioting, which had rocked U.S. cities for several years, shattered Americans’ quiescence in the summer of 1967. Twenty-five major riots, lasting two days or more, and thirty minor ones erupted. Fires burned and blood flowed in the streets. Police and national guard troops killed twenty-six African Americans in Newark and forty-three in Detroit.42

  The campuses were also abuzz with activism. Incipient student radicalism was enflamed by the February 1967 exposé of rampant and illegal CIA infiltration and financing of seemingly liberal organizations at home as well as abroad. Ramparts magazine set th
ings into motion by revealing that the CIA had been funding the National Student Association. The New York Times and the Washington Post exposed other groups as Agency fronts. These and other publications disclosed that the CIA had been funneling money to anti-Communist professors, journalists, aid workers, missionaries, labor leaders, and civil rights activists who did the Agency’s dirty work. Among the discredited organizations were the Congress for Cultural Freedom, the Ford Foundation, Radio Free Europe, and Radio Liberty.

  The public outcry was intense. Walter Lippmann noted that to the American people the CIA’s covert activities had “begun to smell like a backed up cesspool.”43

  The Ramparts exposé sent shivers down the spine of intelligence officials, who feared that other CIA operations would be blown. Under the leadership of James Angleton, who headed the agency’s counterintelligence operations from 1954 to 1974, the CIA had been actively involved in creating and using foreign police forces, security forces, and counterterrorism units in numerous countries. Angleton’s obsession with a menacing Soviet Union bent upon domination, conquest, and infiltration was revealed in an internal CIA history that was declassified in 2007. The Overseas Internal Security Program, as it was called, had trained 771,217 military and police officers in twenty-five countries and helped create the secret police in Cambodia, Colombia, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Iran, Iraq, Laos, Peru, the Philippines, South Korea, South Vietnam, and Thailand. Many had received training at the School of the Americas in Panama, including future death squad leaders in Honduras and El Salvador. Robert Amory, the CIA intelligence chief under Eisenhower and Kennedy, worried that the operations and their “Gestapo-type tactics put the agency on dangerous ground.”44

  Secretary of State Dean Rusk advises Johnson. As Johnson’s foreign policy moved to the right, most of Kennedy’s old team left the administration. But Rusk remained, playing a much larger role than he had under Kennedy. Although he regularly offered to resign, Rusk stuck with Johnson to the bitter end, never wavering in his support for the war in Vietnam.

  In April 1967, hundreds of thousands rallied against the war in New York City, as U.S. troop levels approached 525,000. The Vietnamese assault on Khe Sanh began in late January 1968, with an enormous rocket and missile attack. The United States responded with the heaviest air raids in the history of warfare. B-52s dropped 100,000 tons of bombs, rockets, and explosives on enemy positions. One NLF leader described the terror of a B-52 attack:

  From a kilometer away, the sonic roar of the B-52 explosions tore eardrums, leaving many of the jungle dwellers permanently deaf. From a kilometer, the shock waves knocked their victims senseless. Any hit within half a kilometer would collapse the walls of an unreinforced bunker, burying alive the people cowering inside. Seen up close, the bomb craters were gigantic—thirty feet across and nearly as deep. . . . The first few times I experienced a B-52 attack it seemed . . . that I had been caught in the Apocalypse. The terror was complete. One lost control of bodily functions as the mind screamed incomprehensible orders to get out.45

  While the seventy-seven-day siege was just getting under way and all eyes were fixed on Khe Sanh, the NLF unleashed the Tet Offensive, catching the United States completely off guard. The NLF suffered huge losses. Though a military defeat for the North Vietnamese and NLF, the Tet Offensive was a political victory for Hanoi and its southern allies. The mood in Washington and Saigon changed from optimism to despair. The falsely propagated belief that victory was at hand was dealt a severe blow as Americans saw that the war was far from over and perhaps not winnable under any circumstances.

  Johnson and National Security Advisor Walt Rostow review a map of the South Vietnamese village of Khe Sanh. The United States responded to the NLF’s invasion of the village with the heaviest air raids in the history of warfare. B-52s dropped 100,000 tons of bombs, rockets, and explosives on enemy positions.

  Controversy erupted again over the United States’ consideration of using nuclear weapons at Khe Sanh. British Prime Minister Harold Wilson used his toast at a White House dinner to inveigh against such an imprudent policy. He was blunter in his appearance on Face the Nation: “Any attempt to escalate this war will be most dangerous. . . . As for the proposal to use tactical nuclear weapons, this would be sheer lunacy. It would not only be disastrous to America’s position, it would run a very, very great risk of escalation for the world.”46

  Johnson succeeded in curbing the speculation. General William Westmoreland, commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam from 1964 to 1968, later regretted that nuclear weapons had not been used. He wrote in his memoirs, “If Washington officials were so intent on ‘sending a message’ to Hanoi, surely small tactical nuclear weapons would be a way to tell Hanoi something.”47

  Meanwhile, as popular opposition to the war exploded, Hoover’s FBI did everything it could to disrupt the antiwar movement, as it had been doing to the civil rights movement for years. Hundreds of FBI agents infiltrated antiwar and New Left organizations. In 1968, FBI activities escalated with the deliberate inclusion of New Left groups in the FBI’s ongoing COINTELPRO program. The Church Committee reported on the FBI’s use of friendly news sources throughout the media.48 In 1965, the FBI had twenty-five media assets in the Chicago area and twenty-eight in New Haven.49 The CIA maintained its own stable of media assets. FBI and CIA flacks went to great lengths to mobilize support for the war while marginalizing the war’s critics and impugning their patriotism.

  Antiwar protestors at the October 1967 march on the Pentagon. As popular opposition to the war exploded, the FBI tried to disrupt the antiwar movement.

  Following Tet, Westmoreland requested another 206,000 troops. Johnson asked Clark Clifford, who was about to replace McNamara as secretary of defense on March 1, to chair a task force reviewing the situation. He assumed that the reliably hawkish senior advisor would support further escalation, but Clifford balked and called together a bipartisan group of “Wise Men.” Following two days of meetings by those elder statesmen, Dean Acheson summed up the consensus view that the country could “no longer do the job we set out to do in the time we have left and we must begin to disengage.”50 Taken by surprise, Johnson was furious. “Everybody is recommending surrender,” he complained.51

  In the aftermath of Tet, Johnson’s popularity plummeted. On March 31, he announced that he was not running for reelection. The war had taken another casualty. Johnson would be far from its last.

  Vietnam was not the only place where U.S. policy in the 1960s was a disaster. Former Time magazine correspondent and Newsweek editor John Gerassi described the crushing poverty in Peru, which typified conditions throughout Latin America:

  more than half the people live outside the money economy altogether. . . . Of the other half, 80 percent earn $53 a year, while 100 families own 90 percent of the native . . . wealth. . . . Of this total, 80 percent is in the hands of just 30 families. Meanwhile, 65 percent of the population is illiterate and 45 percent has never seen a doctor. In Lima, the capital, whose colonial mansions enveloped by ornate wooden balconies help make it one of the most beautiful cities in the world, half of the 1.3 million inhabitants live in rat-infested slums. One, called El Montón, is built around, over, and in the city dump. There, when I visited it, naked children, some too young to know how to walk, competed with pigs for a few bits of food scraps accidentally discarded by the garbage men. . . . Peruvians . . . outside the money economy . . . chew . . . coca leaves to still hunger pains, and average 500 calories a day. Where there is grass, the Peruvian Andes Indian eats it—and also the sheep he kills when it gets so hungry that it begins tearing another sheep’s wool off for its food. The peons who work the land of the whites average one sol (4 cents) a day, and not only labor from sunup to sundown but must also furnish servants for the master’s hacienda or Lima house.52

  A Cabinet Room meeting during a summit of “Wise Men.” In March 1967, following two days of meetings by these elder statesmen, Dean Acheson summed up the consensus view that they c
ould “no longer do the job we set out to do in the time we have left and we must begin to disengage.”

  Johnson’s March 31, 1968, press conference announcing that he would not run for reelection. Johnson’s presidency would be far from Vietnam’s last casualty.

  As unrest surfaced throughout the continent, policy makers in the United States feared the prospect of more Castro-style revolutions and called for increased training for Latin American militaries and police forces. Brazil was one such case. A longtime U.S. ally, Brazil was perhaps the most strategically significant country in Latin America. It was the fifth largest country in the world—its 75 million people occupied an area larger than the continental United States—and it was rich in resources. In August 1961, Brazil’s president stepped down, handing the reins of power to democratically elected Vice President João Goulart. Goulart pushed for economic and land reform, extension of democratic rights, and legalization of the Communist Party. The United States began planning for his ouster.

  The United States implemented a series of measures designed to destabilize the government and precipitate a right-wing military takeover. The Wall Street Journal greased the skids, calling Goulart a “desperately devious, totally ambitious figure whose aim is to seize permanent power and run a fascist state.” In June 1963, the United States cut off all aid to the central government, but increased aid to the military. The Alliance for Progress offered funds to individual states whose governors opposed Goulart. A National Intelligence Estimate the following month reported that “under Goulart, Communists and their sympathizers have achieved . . . influence over Brazilian policy. . . . This could lead ultimately to the establishment of an extreme leftist regime with a strongly anti-US character.”53