American Empire

by Joshua Freeman

  The Kerner Commission recommended a national commitment, largely along the lines already established by Johnson’s Great Society, to fight racial discrimination, create jobs, renew urban areas, and build more public housing outside of ghetto areas. With atypical honesty for an official document, it concluded its report by quoting one of its witnesses, the psychologist Kenneth B. Clark, who had helped prepare the plaintiff’s case in Brown v. Board of Education: “I read the report of the 1919 riot in Chicago, and it is as if I were reading the report of the investigating committee on the Harlem riot of ’35, the report of the investigating committee on the Harlem riot of ’43, and the report of the McCone Commission on the Watts riot. . . . It is a kind of Alice in Wonderland—with the same moving picture re-shown over and over again, the same analysis, the same recommendations, and the same inaction.”

  For Clark, a longtime integrationist, the riots deepened his skepticism about the kind of liberalism embodied in the Kerner Commission report for its lack of meaningful follow-through. Many white Americans questioned the liberalism of the civil rights movement, the Johnson administration, and the Supreme Court for a different reason, because they believed it contributed to the disorders by showing undue deference to lawbreakers and undermining respect for the police and authority. Johnson largely rejected the Kerner Commission recommendations because he saw no political basis for enacting them and, with the ever-mounting costs of the war in Vietnam, no way of funding them. Instead, he pressed Congress to take up again a crime bill he had introduced in 1967, which it ended up passing with provisions authorizing government wiretapping that Johnson himself had not wanted.

  Tet

  The year 1967 proved to be a bloody one in Vietnam for the United States: 9,353 American soldiers died. That more than doubled the total American death toll since the beginning of the war. Though everything pointed to a stalemate, Johnson remained committed to seeking military victory, continuing the bombing of North Vietnam and letting U.S. forces carry the main burden of the fighting in the south. Public opinion polls showed widespread public disapproval of his handling of the war (though his critics differed over whether to de-escalate the military effort or intensify it). Dogged by protests wherever he went, the president became reluctant to leave the White House.

  In late 1967, U.S. military and intelligence agencies received information that a communist offensive was in the works, but they took only limited action in response. Psychologically and politically committed to the idea—repeatedly stated by General Westmoreland and other administration leaders—that the United States was making significant progress in defeating the communists, American officials could not believe that the enemy was capable of mounting a countrywide offensive. Instead, they assumed that their main challenge would be a nasty battle at the U.S. Marine base at Khe Sanh, which was coming under communist siege. Westmoreland became convinced that the communists were trying to replicate their victory over the French at Dien Bien Phu by luring the United States into a prolonged battle on unfavorable terrain.

  Khe Sanh, though one of the bloodiest battles of the war, proved to be a diversion. On January 31, 1968, during the Tet Lunar New Year holiday, communist guerrillas, supplemented in some places by regular North Vietnamese army units, launched a massive offensive that included attacks on thirty-six provincial capitals and five of the six largest South Vietnamese cities. In Saigon, NLF forces attacked a series of high-profile targets, including Tan Son Nhut Air Base, the presidential palace, and the U.S. embassy, and occupied a district of the city for several weeks. The communists held Hue, the former imperial capital, for over two weeks, before falling to an American-led counterattack.

  The Tet offensive shocked the American public and American leaders. The ability of the communists to launch such a widespread attack, including in the very heart of Saigon, demonstrated that U.S. officials had either lied to the public about the course of the war or, even worse, had been themselves seriously deluded. The Saigon-based press corps, which often could not get to remote battles before they ended, now saw and reported on combat literally down the street from their hotels and offices. Their reportage came just at the moment when the television networks were beginning to use satellite transmission on a regular basis to get pictures from Asia to the United States on the same day they were taken and when broadsheet newspapers were beginning to make greater use of photography. As a result, the public saw the ferocity and brutality of the war with an intimacy and immediacy without precedent.

  Within a few weeks, the U.S. and South Vietnamese military regained all the territory the communist forces had captured, inflicting crippling casualties upon them. By the time the offensive ended, the NLF’s urban political and military infrastructure, clandestinely built up over years, had been all but destroyed, as had much of its local guerrilla fighting force. After Tet, the communists increasingly had to rely on political and military forces from North Vietnam for the struggle in the south.

  Nonetheless, though they paid an extraordinarily high price to do so, the communists partially achieved their political objectives. The popular urban uprisings they hoped would occur never materialized. But the Tet offensive, which over the course of four weeks killed four thousand American and South Vietnamese soldiers, forced a fundamental U.S. reassessment of the war.

  Even before Tet, some top policymakers were acknowledging, at least to themselves, that the United States had no realistic prospect for military victory. In November 1967, McNamara broke with Johnson by privately calling for a halt to the bombing of North Vietnam as a step toward a negotiated disengagement. In response, Johnson eased him out of office. When in the wake of Tet General Earle C. Wheeler, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, asked the president to send 206,000 more soldiers to Vietnam and call up the Reserves, he demurred. Instead, he asked his new defense secretary, veteran Democratic insider Clark Clifford, to undertake an assessment of the war. Economic and political developments, along with the military situation, were leading to a realization in ruling circles that the United States could not keep doing more of the same in Vietnam.

  In March 1968, just weeks after the Tet fighting died down, the Johnson administration faced one of the most serious international economic crises since the end of World War II. It stemmed from the country’s post–World War II military and economic expansionism and, more immediately, the cost of the Vietnam War. From 1950 on, the United States had a balance of payments deficit; more dollars left the country than came in. The problem lay not in trade—the United States exported more than it imported—but from overseas military deployments, foreign aid, spending abroad by American tourists, and overseas investments. These were the costs of dominating and defending the world capitalist bloc. The growing pool of overseas dollars helped maintain liquidity for trade (as the dollar became a medium of international exchange) but worried American policymakers, since the postwar Bretton Woods agreement called for the convertibility of gold and dollars at a fixed price. Foreign holders of dollars could, whenever they wanted, ask the U.S. government to redeem them in gold. Kennedy and Johnson took a series of modest steps that reduced the balance of payments gap and, along with a strong economy, lessened fears of a run on gold reserves. But the Vietnam War made the chronic problem acute.

  Compared to other twentieth-century wars, Vietnam was cheap. During World War II, the country devoted nearly a third of its GNP to the military; during Korea, a tenth; during Vietnam, less than a twelfth. But unlike World War II and Korea, which occurred during periods of economic depression or at least idle capacity, Vietnam came during a period of economic expansion and near full production. Rather than bringing prosperity, as previous wars had, Vietnam threatened it, by placing excessive demands on industrial capacity and the labor market. By early 1968, inflation reached 4.4 percent, low by later standards but high compared to previous years. Furthermore, while Congress hiked taxes early in World War II and Korea to help finance the fighting,
Johnson resisted asking for a Vietnam tax increase. As a result, the federal deficit ballooned, creating further inflationary pressure while making it increasingly difficult to sustain the elevated levels of domestic spending that came with the Great Society. In early 1967, Johnson finally asked for an income tax surcharge to fund the war, but Wilbur Mills, head of the House Ways and Means Committee, refused to go along unless the president agreed to a simultaneous deep cut in domestic spending. Johnson balked, hoping to avoid gutting his social programs. The stalemate continued until mid-1968, when the president reluctantly agreed to reduce domestic spending by $6 billion in return for a 10 percent income tax surcharge.

  With overseas spending for Vietnam adding to the balance of payments problem, inflation diminishing the purchasing power of the dollar, and federal deficits growing, international confidence in U.S. currency frayed. A devaluation of the British pound in November 1967 set off a rush to buy gold, destabilizing the market. In early March, a new gold run began, this time from overseas holders of dollars seeking to unload them. As the United States and the European central banks struggled to meet the gold demand without changing its dollar price (which would have meant a de facto devaluation of the dollar), an emergency international economic conference convened, which managed to make patchwork changes in the Bretton Woods system that preserved it for a few more years. But the near default on the American obligation to buy gold at a fixed price demonstrated to political and business leaders the strains Vietnam had placed on the economy and how it was undermining, rather than strengthening, the country’s international position.

  The North Korean capture of a U.S. ship likewise made painfully clear how far Vietnam had drained national resources. The Koreans seized the USS Pueblo, a lightly armed spy ship, off their coast in January 1968, with one crew member dying in the incident. Johnson felt constrained from taking military measures against North Korea with so many resources tied up in Vietnam and the use of force there increasingly unpopular. A second armed engagement would have deeply tested the country’s military capacity and had severe economic as well as political ramifications. So the United States found itself sitting by for eleven months until North Korea finally released the eighty-two surviving crew members in exchange for an American admission of guilt and an apology.

  Political developments added to the military and economic pressure to change course in Vietnam. By 1967, liberal disillusionment with the war had begun to penetrate into the Democratic Party. That fall, a “Dump Johnson” movement searched for a candidate to challenge the president within his own party. After being turned down by several critics of the war, including Robert F. Kennedy, who had left the Johnson administration to win a Senate seat from New York, Minnesota senator Eugene McCarthy agreed to be the standard-bearer. McCarthy ran as a critic of the war and an alternative to radicalism, hoping to alleviate what he called the “discontent and frustration and a disposition to take extralegal if not illegal actions to manifest protest.” For many of his supporters, largely white and middle-class, his candidacy promised an opportunity to overcome deepening social divisions and restore legitimacy to the political system. Thus the rash of publicity about young people who decided to “Get Clean for Gene”—shave off mustaches, cut hair, or change clothes to campaign for McCarthy in the New Hampshire primary, the first of the presidential contests. Many college students did work for him, though few were hard-core New Leftists or counterculturalists, most of whom had already written off the election process. But the myth that such young people were reentering politics, promoted by McCarthy’s advertising, provided comfort to Americans distressed by the generation gap and the growing militancy of the disaffected.

  Tet changed the McCarthy campaign from a symbolic effort, as it had been conceived of, into a serious challenge at the polls. In the March 12 New Hampshire primary, McCarthy shocked the country and the Democratic Party by nearly matching Johnson’s vote total while winning the bulk of the state’s convention delegates. Four days later, Robert Kennedy, having seen Johnson’s vulnerability, reversed himself, announcing his candidacy for the presidency. Johnson’s worst political nightmare, a tough race that he might well lose against a man he loathed, now lay on the horizon. Even without Kennedy on the ballot, a White House poll found only a slim chance that the president would win the majority of votes in the April 2 Wisconsin primary.

  In elite quarters, too, Johnson found his war policies being rejected. In March, Clark Clifford reported, “I make it a practice to keep in touch with friends in business and the law across the land. . . . Until a few months ago, they were generally supportive of the war. . . . Now all that has changed. . . . These men now feel we are in a hopeless bog. The idea of going deeper into the bog strikes them as mad. . . . It would be very difficult—I believe it would be impossible—for the President to maintain public support for the war without the support of these men.” Johnson was shaken when the nation’s leading television newsman, Walter Cronkite, who normally kept his political views to himself, declared the Vietnam War to be a stalemate, with “the only rational way out . . . to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could.”

  With many top government leaders, including Johnson, increasingly convinced of the need for a policy change, the administration convened a late March meeting of the Senior Advisory Group of the State Department, the so-called Wise Men, a collection of key Cold War policymakers, chaired by Dean Acheson. They received frank briefings, some quite pessimistic. While in the fall the Wise Men had backed LBJ’s course in Vietnam, now they concluded that U.S. victory was impossible without total war and that the administration’s policy had lost the support of the American people. The weight of opinion had shifted in the nation’s most powerful circles to conclude that victory in Vietnam was not worth the price that would have to be paid to achieve it. The next morning the president told his top military advisers, “Our fiscal situation is abominable. . . . There has been a panic in the last three weeks.” The Joint Chiefs’ request for more troops, which had been leaked to the New York Times, “would cost $15 billion. That would hurt the dollar and gold. . . . The country is demoralized. I will have overwhelming disapproval in the polls and the elections. I will go down the drain. I don’t want the whole [U.S.-led international] alliance and military pulled in with it. . . . We have no support for the war.”

  On March 31, in a televised speech, Johnson announced that only a limited number of additional troops would be sent to Vietnam, rejecting the military’s request for a much larger buildup. He also announced a halt to bombing over the northern part of North Vietnam, where most of the population lived. Furthermore, he appealed to North Vietnam to begin negotiations, saying that “the United States is ready to send its representatives to any forum, at any time, to discuss the means of bringing this ugly war to an end.” Finally, at the end of his long address, Johnson said that he would not seek or accept the Democratic nomination for the presidency, an unexpected, startling decision. Though he explained it by a desire to devote all his time to the war and domestic problems, he had long considered not running for reelection, worried about his health and his ability to win.

  Johnson had not decided to de-escalate the war, only to limit it within certain parameters and avoid a major commitment of additional resources. In preliminary negotiations with the North Vietnamese, which began in Paris in May, both sides took a hard line, with little progress. Meanwhile, on the ground, fierce fighting brought U.S. casualty rates to their highest level of the whole war, in May doubling the rate during Tet. The United States intensified its bombing of the southern part of North Vietnam, South Vietnam, and Laos. What had changed was that after March 1968 there were no illusions left that the United States could or would even try to achieve outright military victory.

  1968

  The Tet offensive, McCarthy’s and Kennedy’s challenges, and Johnson’s withdrawa
l started 1968 with an unaccustomed sense of uncertainty about the future. Within days of Johnson’s March 31 announcement, uncertainty deepened and darkened with a cascade of violence, protest, and social disarray. On April 4, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, setting off the most extensive urban rioting in the country’s history.

  After the passage of the Voting Rights Act, King’s national political role had diminished while growing more complex, as the movement for black advancement found new foci. In the South, a long, difficult struggle, largely through grassroots activity, unfolded to implement the guarantees of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts. The depth of the challenge became evident even to those far from the South in 1966, when James Meredith, who had been the first black student admitted to the University of Mississippi, was shot while undertaking a “walk against fear” across Mississippi. During a continuation of his march, led by top civil rights leaders, the slogan of “Black Power” first received national attention when SNCC leader Stokely Carmichael began using it at rallies along the way.

  A multifarious notion, Black Power in part reflected conditions in the rural South, where many African Americans came to believe that their best chance for improving their lives lay in winning an equitable share of political power and economic resources rather than in focusing on racial integration. In the de facto segregated cities of the North, Black Power also became a rallying cry, sometimes as a call for black separatism, sometimes as a demand for community control over schools, police, and other social resources, sometimes as a push to elect African Americans to office, and often above all else as a cultural mood. Malcolm X, who in his lifetime had failed to build a mass political movement, emerged after his assassination in February 1965 as the symbol and inspiration of the movement toward Black Power. The slow pace and limited returns of the push for racial integration (which Malcolm X had opposed) led many African Americans to question the goal and the use of nonviolent action to achieve it. Both SNCC and CORE promoted the idea of Black Power, converting themselves into exclusively African American organizations. The Black Panther Party, founded on the West Coast in 1966, won growing support through its practice of armed self-defense.