They Marched Into Sunlight

by David Maraniss

  McNamara reported that Warren Christopher, a deputy attorney general, was leading an interdepartmental task force on the October demonstrations. There were several key questions to be answered, McNamara added. “They would include whether the president should be in Washington or not.”

  “Yes, I will be there,” Johnson responded. “They are not going to run me out of town.”

  Certainly not, McNamara said, but nonetheless “the president’s presence in Washington may do more to stimulate than to calm it.” And there were other matters related to the protest that needed answers, McNamara added. “We have got to train the Washington police and the National Guard to handle this job. We also have to figure out how to arrest thousands and put them in jail if it is justified. The jails won’t hold the numbers that could be arrested.”

  The conversation eventually circled back to the war.

  LBJ brought up a captured document written by a North Vietnamese professor that “showed that the Gallup Poll in this country sustained them in Hanoi.” In the document the professor asked, “‘How can we believe anything Johnson says if his own people do not believe him?’”

  McNamara said the Kissinger formula seemed the appropriate way to go if they stopped the bombing.

  The president said he would not stop the bombing unless the North agreed “one, to meet promptly, and two, to push for a settlement.”

  As they deliberated the bombing pause, McNamara said, it was important that they “know the facts” about the impact of Rolling Thunder, the operational name of the aerial bombardment of North Vietnam. It was a strategy about which McNamara now had grave doubts. As far back as February 1966, according to Vietnam historian Stanley Karnow, the defense secretary had shared those doubts privately with journalists, telling Karnow and other correspondents during a meeting in his hotel room in Honolulu that he believed “no amount of bombing” could end the war. In August 1967 he had testified at hearings on the air war conducted by the Senate’s Preparedness Investigative Subcommittee, chaired by Mississippi senator John C. Stennis and dominated by like-minded hawks who wanted to give the military the freedom to bomb at will in the North. At those hearings, which were closed to the press and public, McNamara had asserted that no amount of bombing could stop the enemy “short, that is, of the virtual annihilation of North Vietnam and its people.”

  American planes had dropped nearly 1.5 million tons on the two Vietnams, more than they had dropped in the European theater during World War II—and some 864,000 tons on the North alone. Yet all through 1967 the effect of the bombing runs had been questioned in American intelligence reports. “The NV transport system has emerged from more than 30 months of bombing with greater capacity and flexibility than it had when Rolling Thunder started,” a CIA intelligence memorandum reported in September 1967. “The inventory of freight cars has been maintained and its carrying capacity increased; the number of trucks has also increased despite the high rate of destruction.”

  Rusk was less dismissive of the impact. “If the bombing isn’t having that much effect,” he said, referring to the North Vietnamese, “why do they want to stop the bombing so much?”

  Rostow, seeking to “sum up” from his perspective, said the bombing had cut industrial and agricultural production in the North and diverted nearly a half million men from other tasks. “If we stop the bombing, it will bring their economy back up and permit them to increase their commitment in the South,” Rostow said.

  “I do not agree with that,” McNamara said.

  Johnson shifted the conversation back to politics. He brought up the latest polls and said there seemed to be movement away from the administration position in recent weeks. “We need to get answers to all of these slogans which everybody is making up,” he said. “We need a few slogans of our own.” Then he framed the dilemma in a way that alarmed his advisers. They were hearing something they had not heard before.

  “The president said he did not want any of the information which he was about to discuss to go outside of the room,” Tom Johnson wrote in his notes. “The president asked what effect it would have on the war if he announced he was not going to run for another term. He said if it were set either way today, the decision would be that he would not run.” He was “already in the goldfish bowl,” LBJ said, so it might be “good for all of those who want to have the job” to “come out with the programs and policies and let the American people decide who they believe should be their next president.”

  Rusk was in no mood for such musings. “You must not go down,” he said. “You are the commander in chief and we are in a war. This would have a very serious effect on the country.”

  “If I were to run again, I would be the first president to do it,” Johnson responded. “That is, no other president who has served for part of a term, then for a full term, has ever succeeded himself for another full term.”

  “I don’t think you should appear too cute on this,” said McNamara. It was an interesting comment from a defense secretary who himself was burning out that October, privately losing confidence in the war he had prosecuted with such mathematic assuredness in earlier years. It was now obvious to his colleagues and the president that the defense secretary’s nerves were raw, even if he could hide the private sadness that overtook him occasionally in the privacy of his Pentagon office. While telling LBJ not to appear too cute, McNamara was already assessing his own way out, from his position, not the war—a job offer from the World Bank.

  “What I am asking is: What would this do to the war?” Johnson continued.

  “Hanoi would think they have got it made,” said Rusk.

  “Our people will not hold out four more years,” Johnson said. “I want to get rid of every major target. Between now and the election, I am going to work my guts out. I would be sixty-one when I came back in, and I just don’t know if I want four more years of this. I would consider telling the American people that it is an awfully long period. But I am afraid it would be interpreted as walking out on our men. We are very divisive. We don’t have the press, the newspapers, or the polls with us, although when I get out into the country, it seems different than it is here.”

  “Victor Riesel, a labor columnist, said you would win by a bigger margin next year than you did before,” Rusk noted.

  “What I really want to know,” Johnson said, “is the effect of the announcement—what we say if we do decide that way, and the timing of it.”

  “Of course, there would be no worry about money and men,” McNamara said. “We could get support for that. I do not know about the psychology in the country, the effect on the morale of the men, and the effect on Hanoi. I do think that they would not negotiate under any circumstances and they would wait for the 1968 elections.”

  The same group, minus Helms, met again on October 4. There was no talk about Johnson’s future this time, only hard words about North Vietnam and negotiations and bombs. Two messages had come in from the Kissinger contact, generating confusion about Hanoi’s intentions. The first message quoted Mai Van Bo as saying that a cessation of bombing would elicit “a solemn engagement to talk.” That line was missing from the second message. “They are still weaseling on us,” Rusk concluded.

  Johnson was in a bombs-away mood. He wanted to bomb everything right up to the edge of Hanoi, he said. “I know this bombing must be hurting them. Despite any reports to the contrary. I can feel it in my bones…. We need to pour the steel on. Let’s hit them every day and go every place except Hanoi.”

  DOUGLASS CATER, another White House aide, had what he called his “bi-monthly clash” at lunch with James (Scotty) Reston of the New York Times that day. He began by reading from Reston’s latest column, which accused LBJ of addressing “the politics rather than the policy of the problems” in Vietnam. This was “bad history and bad analysis,” Cater lectured Reston. He said the columnist might understand how wayward his thinking was if he read Bruce Catton’s Terrible Swift Sword. That book, as Cater described it in a mem
orandum to President Johnson, “recounts the misguided criticisms of Horace Greeley, the Scotty Reston of his day, against Lincoln during the awful middle years of the Civil War.”

  Reston “lamented the spectacle we were creating throughout the world of an idealistic nation that was coming more and more to rely on pure power.” Cater answered that there was a “certain amount of hypocrisy in the public position of foreign political leaders,” who for the most part were “not really so critical in private.” Reston then took “a different turn in the argument by asking what we really hoped to accomplish in Vietnam. We were committed to get out within six months of a settlement. Obviously, we would never go back in if trouble flared again. What would all the death and suffering have accomplished?”

  A few days later White House officials picked up early word of another development in the journalism world more problematic than a Scotty Reston column. Life magazine, once a pillar of establishment support for the war, was preparing an October editorial calling on the Johnson administration to stop bombing North Vietnam and negotiate a peace settlement. Henry Luce, founding editor of Time-Life, had died earlier in 1967, and his death had coincided with a significant shift in his magazine empire’s view of the world in general and Vietnam in particular. Hedley Donovan, the new editor of Time-Life publications, had returned from Vietnam that year rethinking his support and talking about journalists who ought to consider “saying out loud that they were wrong about the war.” That is precisely what the editorial would do. In Life’s revised view, the United States had gone into Vietnam “for honorable and sensible purposes,” but the task “proved to be harder, longer, and more complicated than had been foreseen” and it was no longer vital enough “to ask young Americans to die for.”

  The liberal Times was one thing, a dovish Life quite another. News of the imminent antiwar editorial heightened the siege atmosphere at the White House.

  During that second week in October, newspapers in New York and Washington were presenting the latest analysis from General Giap, which stirred more controversy. Americans tended to think that Vo Nguyen Giap was the unchallenged voice of the North Vietnamese military, but that was a misreading. Sick for much of the summer and early fall of 1967, he had spent weeks at a time in Hungary, recovering from a heart ailment. Hanoi’s military planning for the next year was being done largely without him and even at times against his advice. But what he had to say, internally or for world consumption, still carried great weight. Giap too was now declaring the war a stalemate, according to a CIA translation of a lengthy assessment he wrote for the North Vietnamese Armed Forces newspaper. And a stalemate meant that eventually his side would win. No matter how many troops the United States sent to Vietnam, the stalemate would persist. The Americans were unlikely to invade the North, he suggested, because that would only further dilute their forces and run the risk of bringing China into the conflict. His side would outlast the Americans in a protracted war. America did not have the stomach for it, he said, especially with so many people in the United States already opposed to the military intervention in Vietnam. In the second-to-last paragraph of the New York Times story, Giap was said to have called the antiwar movement in the United States “a valuable mark of sympathy.”

  This last comment did not signify anything new. The antiwar movement had been praised in Liberation Radio broadcasts and propaganda from Hanoi since the troop buildup began in 1965. As the war continued, the peace movement in the United States became an increasingly important factor in the strategy of the National Liberation Front and the politicians in Hanoi. At provincial meetings during the summer of 1967, local Viet Cong officials had been lectured on the details of Resolution 13, a measure adopted by the North Vietnamese Communist party (Lao Dong) that “mentioned antiwar sentiment in the U.S.” and “dissension between hawks and doves and between negroes and whites.” According to an American intelligence report based on captured documents and prisoner interrogations, “the stated VC policy was that the longer the war continued, the stronger the U.S. doves would become and the Viet Cong were therefore dedicated to fight at least until the 1968 presidential election.” The prevailing view in Hanoi was that the Johnson administration was “losing prestige” and that LBJ might “lose to a dove candidate.”

  All of this, but especially Giap’s assertion that the antiwar movement was valuable to his side, provoked a vitriolic congressional debate about the meaning of wartime dissent. Speaker John W. McCormack, an old-line Johnson loyalist, strode to the well of the House on October 11 with a copy of the Times rolled in his hand and angrily pounded the table with it as he denounced critics of the American war effort. “If I was one of those, my conscience would disturb me the rest of my life,” McCormack said. He followed with an obligatory homage to freedom of speech that served as a rhetorical bridge to further denunciation of outspoken doves: “Nobody argues with the right to dissent. But if I had an opinion that I thought would be adverse to the interests of my country, I would withhold it.” A hundred congressmen rose to a standing ovation in the House chamber and bathed their old speaker in thunderous applause. His attack was seconded by another party loyalist, Emanuel Celler of New York, who said that Johnson’s detractors “wear their criticism as if it was a badge of intellectual superiority.”

  In the Senate, Republican minority leader Everett McKinley Dirksen had launched a vigorous bipartisan defense of President Johnson a few days earlier. “He has a little stronger chemical in his system than others,” explained Dean Rusk, when Johnson wondered aloud at a meeting of his war council how the hoarse-throated septuagenarian Illinois senator could “stand up and be my defender the way he has been.” The first line of Dirksen’s defense was to challenge the president’s critics, saying they had gone beyond “due bounds.” Dirksen was talking primarily not about liberal Democrats, and certainly not about activist students, but rather was aiming at moderate members of his own party who had turned against the war, senators like Charles Percy, his Illinois colleague, Thurston B. Morton of Kentucky, and Clifford P. Case of New Jersey.

  Dissent, Case responded, was not only within due bounds, it was vital to democracy. “Just as it was proper for the Senator from Illinois to call to the attention of us our responsibility not to weaken the cause of our nation, the cause of freedom in the world, so I think it is equally important for all of us to meet our responsibility, when we disagree with the conduct of affairs by our government, to state that disagreement as clearly and distinctly as possible, whether in time of peace or in time of war.” One of the lead critics on the Democratic side, Senator J. W. Fulbright of Arkansas, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said the hostile atmosphere was not caused by the war’s opponents but by the war itself, which had created “an unhealthy atmosphere of suspicion and recrimination.” And it was the war, Fulbright argued, that was threatening to turn LBJ’s Great Society into a sick society.

  Vietnam consumed Congress no less than the White House in those days of October. Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield of Montana, a moderate Democrat who was universally respected as he operated in the space between his president and antiwar liberals in his party, was now pushing hard for a United Nations role in peace negotiations, a concept that had the support of at least thirty senators. Senator George McGovern of South Dakota (whose daughter Susan was in Madison, a senior at the University of Wisconsin) sent a memorandum to the White House on October 12 in which he urged the president to halt the bombing of North Vietnam indefinitely and tell Saigon that “we now expect them to assume a greater burden of responsibility for the conduct of this war and for securing negotiations to end it.” McGovern also offered some military advice that related directly to what Terry Allen and Clark Welch and their soldiers were doing in the Long Nguyen Secret Zone that week. “Recognizing that this is a struggle for people rather than territory,” McGovern wrote, “we should quietly replace the search and destroy operations with clear and hold operations in the South.”

 
The next day thirty members of the House sent an open letter to Johnson expressing alarm “at the increasing escalation of bombings by American planes over North Vietnam.” The bombing campaign “has been tried and has failed to accomplish its objectives,” the congressmen argued, so “the time has come” to stop it and open the way for “a reasonable and peaceful settlement of this tragic conflict.” Among those signing the letter was Robert W. Kastenmeier, whose district included Madison.

  ALL WAS AFLAME THAT OCTOBER. The war, the antiwar, the fields and jungles of Vietnam, the halls of Congress, the campuses of America. Pour the steel on, Lyndon Johnson said.

  But his battle was more than bombs and statistics. It also involved trying to make the hardest case against his enemies, real and perceived. Who were these people in the antiwar movement? What were their connections? Who was funding them? Why were they organizing a nationwide week of protests against the draft and the war, preparing to spread a fire of dissent from the recruiting station in Oakland to Bascom Hill in Madison to the mall in Washington? How could they march on the Pentagon and dare to think they could run the president out of town? Were Communists behind all this?

  Some in the Johnson White House suspected they were, and the CIA had been given the clandestine mission to find out. Two months earlier, in the heat of August, the agency’s counterintelligence staff had set up a special operations group to monitor “radical students and U.S. Negro expatriates as well as travelers passing through certain select areas abroad.” Its goal was to determine the extent to which the Soviets, Chinese, and Cubans were “exploiting our domestic problems in terms of espionage and subversion.” The operation would soon take on a presumptuously descriptive code name, CHAOS. By the middle of October, the CIA had collected enough surveillance data to begin preparing a report about the international connections of the U.S. peace movement.