That year the White House press corps entertained themselves by drawing up a list of what could be the shortest books ever written. The top three were Italian War Heroes, the Polish Who’s Who, and Mistakes I Made, by Lyndon Baines Johnson. Many of those who knew the President best believed that he never searched his own soul because he never felt secure enough to do it. His problem certainly wasn’t a lack of intelligence. Eric Goldman, a Princeton professor who became a Johnson aide, wrote: “After years of meeting first-rate minds in and out of universities, I am sure I have never met a more intelligent person than Lyndon Johnson—intelligent in terms of sheer IQ’s, a clear, swift, penetrating mind, with an abundance of its own type of imagination and subtleties.” The difficulty appeared to be rooted in the realization that his youth had been culturally deprived. The high school he attended hadn’t even been accredited by the easygoing standards of its region.
In a revealing outburst he once said to Hugh Sidey of Time, “I don’t believe that I’ll ever get credit for anything I do in foreign affairs, no matter how successful it is, because I didn’t go to Harvard.” That was absurd, though his suspicion of intellectuals was not. Their contempt for him—there is no other word for it—was a shocking phenomenon of the 1960s. They jeered at him for pulling the ears of his beagles, as though that mattered. Buttons worn on campuses read, “King Lyndon the First,” “Sterilize LBJ: No More Ugly Children,” “Hitler Is Alive—in the White House,” and—most unforgivable of all—“Lee Harvey Oswald, Where Are You Now That We Need You?” They applauded MacBird, which in depicting him as an assassin was in far worse taste than any lapse of his, and they justified their conduct as an expression of mourning for Kennedy—unwilling or unable to realize that Kennedy had chosen Johnson as his Vice President precisely because he was so able. Theodore White noted that “Political jokes were resurrected from as far back as the days of Herbert Hoover and pinned on Johnson; bedroom jokes of the President’s life with Lady Bird were of a pornography to match those about Franklin Roosevelt’s life with Eleanor.” The Secret Service reported that crank letters attacking the President jumped from a hundred a month to over a thousand.
Johnson’s speaking manner did not help. He suppressed his natural warmth and earthiness and tried to appear solemn and humble instead. What came through on the TV tube was unction and sanctimony. Instinctively people realized that whatever the real Lyndon Johnson was like, this one was a fake. The feeling that he was a mountebank was heightened by his inability to cast aside the extravagant style of the southern politician, so alien to a nation which had become accustomed to Kennedy understatement. Johnson was derisively christened “Uncle Cornpone,” and to some extent he deserved it. Addressing the nation over television after settling the railroad strike, he read a letter he had received from a seven-year-old child in Park Forest, Illinois, named Cathy May Baker. “My grandmother lives in New York,” Cathy had written. “She is coming to see me make my first Holy Communion. Please keep the railroads running so that she can come to see me.” The President said, “So Cathy’s grandmother can now go to see her.” As a senator he had been able to get away with this sort of thing, but no more; within twenty-four hours the country learned that the letter was ten days old. Cathy’s grandmother had visited her, witnessed the Communion, and returned to New York. Johnson never learned to abandon such stratagems. Later, when the issue was Vietnam, his habitual stretching of the truth would be much more damaging.
Liz Carpenter, one of his devoted Texans, wrote: “When I think of Lyndon Johnson, I always seem to see a Long Arm—reaching out to pick up a telephone, to grab a sheaf of papers, to shake hands, to embrace, to comfort, to persuade, sometimes even to shove—but always to include, yes, always to include.” But not everybody. Johnson excluded Robert F. Kennedy. They brought out the worst in each other. It was the strong, irrational dislike of two proud and sensitive men, and it had been evident long before the tragedy in Dallas. Robert Kennedy had opposed his brother’s choice of Johnson in Los Angeles, and Johnson at times seemed to oppose the younger Kennedy’s very existence. Johnsonians could be very bitter about their predecessors. Liz Carpenter wished her President had been given “some public words of encouragement from the bereaved family after the assassination…. He never mentioned it, but being a woman and a partisan, I was conscious of the silence… the Kennedys looked at the living and wished for the dead and made no move to comfort the country.”
Undoubtedly grief for the slain President made Johnson’s task harder, but it was not confined to the Kennedy family. Shortly after the assassination Congressman Clarence Cannon of Missouri predicted that “Everything will be Kennedy for a while. Then people will forget.” But they did not forget. Magazines issued JFK memorial editions which were quickly sold out. The demand for Kennedy books grew ever more insatiable. Collectors of Americana discovered that holographic Kennedy letters were as valuable as Lincoln letters. An autographed copy of Profiles in Courage brought $375. To point up the Kennedy-Johnson transition, the presidential staff took to distributing pictures of both Presidents during Johnsonian trips, but the practice was soon discontinued; for every Johnson picture the public took ten of Kennedy. The Secret Service raged when the new chief executive rebuked an agent for wearing a Kennedy PT boat tie clip, but Johnson’s resentment was understandable. He was being shadowed by a ghost.
It must have sometimes seemed to him that he was encountering Kennedys whichever way he turned. He sent Bob and Ethel Kennedy off on a tour of the Far East and the tour was on every front page. Ted Kennedy was hurt in a plane crash and the accident obscured Johnson’s announcement that U.S. military might was greater than the combined strength of all the armies and navies in the history of the world. Above all there was Jacqueline Kennedy, whose most trivial remark or appearance could eclipse a statement by the President. Gallup reported that the First Lady, in a break with tradition, was only the second most admired woman in the United States; her predecessor was still first. In July 1964 Mrs. Kennedy moved to New York, and there was hope in the White House that the country’s idolatry of her might diminish. It didn’t; the mere fact that she continued to prefer bouffant hairdos to hats was enough to do to the women’s hat industry what her husband had done to the men’s.
Francis B. Sayre, dean of the Episcopalian Washington Cathedral and a Kennedy friend, rose in the pulpit to call Johnson “a man whose public house is splendid in its every appearance but whose private lack of ethic most inevitably introduces termites at the very foundation.” The Washington Star commented that Sayre’s “harsh pronouncement, we suspect, sums up the real mood of a great part of the electorate.” Even harder for the President to bear were the vicious rumors that he was implicated in his predecessor’s death. A commission headed by Chief Justice Earl Warren found that Kennedy had been murdered by Lee Harvey Oswald, who had acted alone, and the Kennedy family did everything possible to encourage acceptance of the commission’s findings, but irresponsible attacks on the Warren Report continued throughout Johnson’s years in the White House, sometimes in respectable society. The New York World Journal Tribune commented that “Out of respect for the memory of a martyred President, we think it is time to ask the ghouls, the buck-chasers, the sensation-mongers and the character assassins to desist—to shut up until or unless they can put up, as so far they have so notoriously failed to do.” It was wasted ink; assaults on the report continued, and reached a high-water mark when the British Broadcasting Company paid a discredited critic $40,000, a record price, for a two-hour film which proved nothing.
The “Bobby problem,” as it was called in the White House, became a major headache for Johnson. The new President had been in office less than six months when Washington became aware that the previous President’s brother was building a government-in-exile. Comprised of New Frontiersmen who had left the government, the Kennedy people met at Jacqueline Kennedy’s Georgetown residence that spring and, after she left Washington, at the attorney general’s home, Hickory Hi
ll. They were united in hostility to Johnson. None of them believed that he had been responsible for the tragedy in Dallas, of course, but they did feel that the younger Kennedy had a right to become Johnson’s Vice President. They had lost touch with reality. There was never any possibility that the two men might run on the same ticket. In one of his milder comments on Bob Kennedy, President Johnson said, “That upstart’s come too far and too fast. He skipped the grades where you learn the rules of life. He never liked me, and that’s nothing compared to what I think of him.” Johnson people called Bob a former McCarthyite and a “liberal fascist”; they said he was “Rover Boy, without birth control,” and that he supported “God and country—in that order, after the Kennedys.”
At 1 P.M. on Wednesday, July 29, 1964, the President summoned Attorney General Kennedy to the oval office and told him that he would not be his running mate. Johnson said that he approved of the young Kennedy’s ambition and thought it would be fine if Bob ran the country some day. But not yet. He offered him his choice of any other post in the government and asked him if he would run Johnson’s coming presidential campaign, as he had his brother’s. Bob declined. The manner of announcing the end of Kennedy’s vice-presidential ambitions this year was left undecided. Kennedy left believing that the meeting had been confidential. Evidently Johnson didn’t think so, for he invited three Washington correspondents to lunch the next day and told them about it. That was bad enough; what was worse was that he couldn’t resist using his considerable talents as a mimic to show them how Kennedy had taken it. Bob hadn’t said a word at first when he had been told, the President said. He had just gulped. Johnson showed how he had gulped. When the story reached Kennedy he was furious. He confronted the President and accused him of a breach of confidence. Johnson said he hadn’t told anyone about the meeting, and when Bob bluntly called him a liar he said, well, maybe there was some conversation he had forgotten; he would have to check his records and his calendar.
The President wanted Kennedy to announce that he wouldn’t be on the ticket. Bob wouldn’t do it. That left Johnson with a dilemma. He didn’t want to offend the national Kennedy following. On the other hand, he felt he couldn’t risk leaving the question open; the delegates to the coming Democratic national convention in Atlantic City were Kennedy people, quite capable of choosing Bob themselves. His solution was bizarre and typically Johnsonian. On July 30 he announced: “With reference to the selection of the candidate for Vice President on the Democratic ticket I have reached the conclusion that it would be inadvisable for me to recommend to the convention any member of my Cabinet or any of those who meet regularly with the Cabinet.” He gave no reason. It didn’t make sense. In a stroke he had doomed the vice-presidential ambitions not only of Robert Kennedy but also of McNamara, Stevenson, Shriver, Rusk, and Orville Freeman. Johnson said, “Now that damn albatross is off my neck.” Bob said, “I’m sorry I took so many nice fellows over the side with me.”
***
In The Making of the President 1964 Theodore H. White wrote of a historic encounter that summer: “The deft response of American planes to the jabbing of North Vietnam’s torpedo boats in the Gulf of Tonkin had been carried off with the nicest balance between boldness and precision.” So it seemed then. Later, when disenchantment with the Vietnam War was metastasizing through the country, the events in Tonkin Gulf turned out to be shadowy, imprecise, and, most disturbing, a consequence of deliberate American provocation.
The key to understanding what happened in those waters off North Vietnam during the first week of August 1964 is a U.S. plan for clandestine operations against the Communist forces there whose code designation was 34A. White had never heard of 34A; neither had the American people; neither had Congress, which on the strength of events for which it was responsible was asked to commit, and did commit, the country to a disastrous escalation of the Asian war. To some extent the Gulf of Tonkin incidents may have been misinterpreted and distorted by chance, but those errors would have been inconsequential if men in Washington had not been playing a deeper game. The chief intriguer was President Johnson. He in turn may have been deceived and manipulated by high officers in the Pentagon. All that can be said with certainty is that Congress was maneuvered into supporting hostilities.
Plan 34A was conceived in December 1963, the month after the assassination of President Kennedy. Secretary of Defense McNamara, in Saigon on one of his many inspection trips, liked what he heard of the scheme for stealthy actions against the North Vietnamese. He put General Krulak in charge of it. Back in Washington he described it to President Johnson, who was equally enthusiastic. In execution 34A proved disappointing, however. The attacks by South Vietnamese guerrillas, parachutists, and frogmen were well organized, but the population in North Vietnam liked the Hanoi regime; the saboteurs were betrayed every time. General Harkins and McGeorge Bundy, who were masterminding 34A, switched to commando raids on Communist shore installations by South Vietnamese torpedo boats. Hanoi regarded these as more an annoyance than a threat, but radio intercepts revealed a growing demand for retribution among Communist naval officers commanding the raided North Vietnamese bases.
On Thursday, July 30, 1964, the day that Johnson eliminated Attorney General Kennedy and the rest of his cabinet from the Vice Presidency, a flotilla of South Vietnamese PT boats sailed from Da Nang on a 34A errand. The U.S.S. Maddox, an American destroyer, was headed for the same waters; its task was to goad the shore installations into using their radar and then to plot the radar—the naval equivalent of spotting enemy artillery positions so that they can be destroyed by counterbattery fire. On August 1 the destroyer passed the PTs coming the other way; they had just completed their torpedo attack and were returning home. The destroyer entered the combat zone and began its task of provoking radar operators on the coast. North Vietnamese officers there assumed that the Maddox and the PT boats were part of the same mission. This assumption was clear to Americans who were monitoring radio messages from three North Vietnamese torpedo boats sent out to investigate the destroyer, and their report to that effect was sent back to the Pentagon. There it was filed in the back of a deep drawer without comment. In its report to the White House the Pentagon merely said that the three Communist PT boats had attacked the Maddox, which had responded by sinking one of them.
In the laundered version which was given to the public, the destroyer was said to have been thirty miles from the coast, peacefully sailing through international waters. There was no mention of its assignment, and nothing at all about the South Vietnamese boats. President Johnson ordered the Maddox to continue its activities, and a second destroyer, the Turner Joy, was told to join it. Thus the stage was set for a second Tonkin Gulf incident. The night of August 4, one sailor said later, was “darker than the hubs of hell.” Captain John Herrick, the commander of the destroyer patrol, radioed back that it was clear from interceptions of the North Vietnamese radio that they continued to believe that the American vessels were part of a 34A attack. Like its predecessor, this message was suppressed in the Pentagon. The public was told that American vessels had been the target of a second act of unprovoked aggression, this time when they were sixty-five miles from the coast.
Considering the gravity of the actions based upon it, the evidence in this second episode was surprisingly thin. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee did not hear the full story until three and a half years later. To their astonishment, the senators then learned that there may have been no encounter at all. Blips had appeared on the Turner Joy’s radar screen; the destroyer had opened fire. The Maddox did, too, although its radar screen was clear. Both ships took evasive action. The captain of the Maddox noticed that his signalmen reported torpedoes each time the destroyer turned sharply. After three hours of this Herrick radioed back: “Review of action makes recorded contacts and torpedoes fired appear doubtful. Freak weather effects and overeager sonar man may have accounted for many reports. No actual visual sightings by Maddox. Suggest complete evaluation befo
re further action.” There were certainly North Vietnamese torpedo boats in the vicinity—destroyer gunfire and carrier-based aircraft sank two of them—but the American vessels were undamaged, and there was a very real doubt over which side had fired the first shot. Fourteen hours after the first reported contact the Pentagon was still asking the destroyers for the names of witnesses, their reliability, and the size, type, and number of attacking North Vietnamese forces.
Lyndon Johnson hadn’t waited. On his orders American warplanes were already taking off from the carriers Ticonderoga and Constellation; their targets were four North Vietnamese torpedo boat bases and an oil depot. The next morning the country learned that thirty-five North Vietnamese boats and 90 percent of the depot had been damaged or destroyed. Johnson appeared on television to report that “aggression by terror against the peaceful villages of South Vietnam has now been joined by open aggression on the high seas against the United States of America.” The response, he said, was “limited and fitting. We Americans know, although others appear to forget, the risks of spreading conflict. We seek no wider war.”
Possibly his reaction to these brief clashes between small vessels would have been different if he had been facing another opponent in that election year. Three weeks earlier the Republicans had nominated Barry Goldwater in the San Francisco Cow Palace, and he was accusing the administration of “timidity before Communism.” He brought his admirers to their feet, roaring, with the charge that “the Good Lord raised up this mighty republic to be a home for the brave… not to cringe before the bullying of Communism…. Failures cement the wall of shame in Berlin. Failures blot the sands of shame at the Bay of Pigs. Failures mark the slow death of freedom in Laos. Failures infest the jungles of Vietnam.”
The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972 Page 152