—General Earle G. Wheeler, 1962
Lyndon Baines Johnson was the Lon Chaney of American politics. Just as Chaney, the man with a thousand faces, could play any film role, Johnson could play any political role. He could be all things to all people. Always friendly, always ready to smile and flatter, never afraid to show affection or to express his love, Johnson was almost irresistible. He believed that the intellectuals who criticized him simply did not understand him. He said they
never take the time to think about what really goes on in these one-to-one sessions because they’ve never been involved in persuading anyone to do anything. They’re just like a pack of nuns who’ve convinced themselves that sex is dirty and ugly and low-downed and forced because they never have it. And because they never have it, they see it all as rape instead of seduction and they miss the elaborate preparation that goes on before the act is finally done.
But who was the real Lyndon Johnson? Was he the conservative oil-and-gas man? Certainly other conservative oil-and-gas men believed that Lyndon was their boy in Washington, and they provided the dollars that fueled his political career. Or was he a good Texas populist as his father had been? Or perhaps he was a New Deal liberal Democrat. Perhaps he himself was not sure who he was. All his life he seemed bent on creating a past for himself. He lied about his birth, his parents, his grandparents, his education, and his loves. He claimed that his great-greatgrandfather had died defending the Alamo. When a reporter pointed out to him that none of his relatives had fought at the Alamo, Johnson exclaimed: “God damn it, why must all those journalists be such sticklers for detail? Why, they'd hold you to an accurate description of the first time you ever made love, expecting you to remember the color of the room and the shape of the windows. . . . The fact is that my great-greatgrandfather died at the Battle of San Jacinto, not the Alamo.” But that ancestor—the one who had not died at the Alamo—had also not died at San Jacinto. Johnson advised correspondents to burn his letters. He arranged to have information about his college years cut out of hundreds of copies of the Southwest State Teachers College yearbooks. As his biographer Robert A. Caro writes, “In a sense, Lyndon Johnson not only attempted to create, and leave for history, his own legend, but to ensure that it could never be disproven.” So the real Lyndon Johnson is a riddle.
Johnson was born in 1908 in the Texas Hill Country, a hot, impoverished section of the state. His family was poor, but his mother came from a once-prosperous family that had been financially ruined by a bad investment. In her mind, at least, she remained above the world of dirty men and coarse women who populated the Hill Country. And she told Lyndon that he too was meant for better things, that unlike his father—who was very much at home among the unlettered folk of the Pedernales—he had culture in his blood. He grew up torn between the world of his mother and that of his father. His father cussed and talked politics; his mother read and dreamed of a better life. Lyndon embraced his father’s world. He mastered the crude Texas metaphors, drank, trafficked in power politics, and expressed distrust of ideas, books, and lofty education if not outright contempt for them.
At Southwest Texas State Teachers College, Johnson showed that to achieve power he was willing, even eager, to work tirelessly at the most thankless task. Quick to recognize who had power, he attached himself to the powerful, shamelessly flattered them, made himself indispensable to them. It was a formula that Johnson was to repeat endlessly during his life. At San Marcos, he sought out the school’s president, Cecil Evans. Within a year he was determining who got campus jobs, the life-blood of many poor students. Control of campus jobs translated into power. And Johnson used the power to control campus politics. Nicknamed “Bull” (short for “Bullshit”) Johnson because he told so many lies, Lyndon nevertheless made the tiny school his fiefdom. The acquisition of power, he would often say, was necessary before he could do “good works.” Perhaps his ends were noble, but so often it seemed that Johnson’s only end was more power.
After a brief stint in teaching, Johnson went to Washington as a secretary to Congressman Richard Kleberg. It was 1931, a bleak year in the capital, but Johnson was euphoric. He moved into the Dodge Hotel, where seventy-five other legislative secretaries lived, and studied the conduits of power. He roamed the halls asking questions. He haunted the bathroom seeking knowledge. On his first night at the hotel he took four separate showers because he wanted to meet and talk to the other secretaries. The next morning he walked to the bathroom five times at ten-minute intervals so that he could meet more people. He extracted from each conversation knowledge about the workings of Washington that he mentally cataloged and filed away for future reference. He read the Washington newspapers as well as the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. He talked with elevator operators, cooks, and janitors. And he courted the legislators. He was deferential, full of “Yes, sir” and “No, sir,” and his flattery knew no bounds. One acquaintance called Johnson a “professional son.” No father could wish for more respect and consideration and love from a son than Johnson seemed to give.
Johnson courted several power brokers on Capitol Hill. Most important is that he snuggled in close to Sam Rayburn, whose sharp eyes seemed to see through everyone. Rayburn liked Lyndon—perhaps even understood him—and became an unmatched patron. He helped Johnson get appointed as the Texas director of the National Youth Administration. He also aided Johnson’s successful bid for a vacant congressional seat in 1937. No constituency was better served by an elected official. Johnson wrestled free the federal money needed to build great dams that produced electricity. Because of Johnson, electric light replaced candles and prosperity overcame poverty in the Hill Country.
Politically, Johnson kept rising. As a member of a three-man committee sent by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to observe the progress of the war in the Pacific, he received a Silver Star from General Douglas MacArthur, himself very much a politician, after a plane carrying the congressman came under a Japanese attack. Losing his first bid for the Senate, he won a seat in his second try in 1948. In 1951 he became the Democratic whip of the Senate; in 1953, the Senate minority leader; in 1955, the majority leader. Each new position meant more power and new challenges. Each Johnson mastered with the skill of a political artist. Nobody did it better. And, of course, Johnson loved the power that came with success. One night in 1958, a bit tight and in a good mood, he put an arm around two Texas congressmen and boasted, “I’m one powerful sonofabitch.” It was an understatement. Johnson was the powerful sonofabitch, and everything he did demonstrated that power. This was true even to the smallest detail. The telephone, for example, had replaced the sword and the pen as the symbol of power, and Johnson made sure he was often photographed using the telephone. “No gunman,” remarks one historian, “ever held a Colt.44 so easily” as Johnson handled a telephone.
Of his staff and cabinet Johnson demanded loyalty above honesty, sincerity, and good advice. Johnson once declared: “I don’t want loyalty. I want loyalty. 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.” For the sake of debate Johnson was willing to listen to the other side, but he listened with open ears and a closed mind. After the discussion ended, he expected everyone to agree with his previously formulated ideas. Whoever did not succumb to his flattery and reasoning and listening got exiled.
Raised in a region just emerging from frontier conditions, Johnson had a macho view of life. There were strong men and weak men. To show weakness was worse than cowardly—it was unmanly. Johnson said of the Kennedys that they vacationed at that “female island”—Martha’s Vineyard—and spoke with affected accents. No country could afford to be unmanly, especially in the face of a bully. Remembering Munich—and considering its “lesson” as a universal truth—Johnson remarked, “If you let a bully come into your front yard one day, the next day he will be up on your porch and the day after that he will rape your wife in your own bed.” The statement is pure Johnson, con
crete and packed with sexual metaphor. It breathes an obsession with honor and bravery, the need to defend home and family. On a personal level Johnson was warm, friendly, humorous, and very hard to resist. Before a large group or a television camera, he lost his charm. His manner and language stiffened; his sense of humor fled.
Johnson the consummate politician considered foreign affairs above politics. During the years when his power was the greatest in the Senate, he seldom opposed President Eisenhower on foreign policy issues. In such matters he believed fully in bipartisanship. “I want to make absolutely sure,” Johnson said in 1953, “that the Communists don’t play one branch of government against the other, or one party against the other as happened in the Korean War. . . . If you’re in an airplane, and you’re flying somewhere, you don’t run to the cockpit and attack the pilot.” When bipartisanship died in the Vietnam War, Johnson reacted with anger and pain. “Don’t [the American people] realize,” he asked an aide, “I’m the only President they’ve got?” He could not explain to the people that he was their only pilot. Working in the small universe of the United States Senate, he had learned everyone’s likes and dislikes. A president cannot do that.
When he took the oath of office after Kennedy’s assassination, Johnson was a cold warrior. For Johnson the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, the Berlin Airlift, the Korean War, and the Cuban missile crisis were formative events in American history, bespeaking a commitment to keep the rest of the world from taking the road to communism. He was a true believer. There really was a monolithic communist conspiracy stirring up aggression around the world. In South Vietnam the threat was the Vietcong, who were pawns in the hands of North Vietnam, a puppet of Moscow and Beijing. The United States was in Vietnam, Johnson said, “to join in the defense and protection of freedom of a brave people who are under attack that is controlled . . . and directed from outside their country.”
For a while, that was the consensus among policymakers. Debate concerned tactics, not morality, questions of how, not why. Which weapons were appropriate; which was the more effective, conventional or coun-terinsurgency warfare; what would be the best use of air power; should the United States destroy the dike system in North Vietnam; should the stress be on victory, negotiation, or a reform of Vietnamese politics and society: Such issues divided legislators and administrators who shared the mindset of the times concerning power, virtue, technology, and the domino theory. Even the most serious critics of United States policy in Vietnam were preoccupied with the management of the war, not with its moral or intellectual foundations. While he was attacking American military leaders for their conduct of the war, David Halberstam of the New York Times wrote early in 1965: “Vietnam is a strategic country in the area. It is perhaps one of only five or six nations that is truly vital to U.S. interests.” And Vietnam, so believed Congress and the administration, was vital to American credibility. In order to maintain NATO, SEATO, and its other engagements abroad, the nation had to prove itself periodically. To flee Vietnam might raise questions about the strength of the American dedication to the world struggle against communism. In the mid-1960s war was raging in Laos, and in Cambodia Prince Norodom Sihanouk proclaimed his neutrality in the cold war. Chinese talk of fomenting wars of national liberation was as harsh as ever. Riots against the United States erupted in Panama, and Fidel Castro threatened to export revolution throughout the Western Hemisphere. For the nation to maintain its global commitment to anticom-munism, South Vietnam had to be saved. If South Vietnam fell to the communists, declared Dean Rusk, “Our guarantees with regard to Berlin would lose their credibility.” It was, he said, “part of the same struggle.”
Despite those fears, Johnson remained cautious. There were political risks in rapid escalation. If the United States intervened on a massive scale in South Vietnam, there would be an outpouring of criticism abroad as well as the possibility of serious opposition at home. Johnson had an ambitious program of antipoverty and civil rights legislation planned, and he did not want to undermine his political base in Congress. If the United States entered the war on a large scale, moreover, ARVN forces might cease to fight altogether. Like John Kennedy before him, Lyndon Johnson sought a middle road. But the war slowly escalated.
On February 1, 1964, the navy implemented Oplan 34-A, Victor Kru-lak’s plan for secret missions against North Vietnamese coastal installations. In case the time came to bomb or invade North Vietnam, the United States would need precise information about coastal radar, radio installations, and antiaircraft sites. Squads of South Vietnamese commandos in American-made patrol boats conducted covert raids along the coast in order to activate North Vietnamese radar. United States intelligence-gathering vessels in the South China Sea then collected the necessary information. By the summer of 1964 American military advisers in South Vietnam had reached 20,000 men.
Operation Farmgate was also expanding. Because American pilots found the Vietnamese too cautious, they assumed more and more responsibility. By mid-1964 more than one hundred air force pilots were flying regular combat missions to support ARVN operations. Farmgate flights did not come to light until May 1964, when Captain Edwin G. Shank was shot down in his T-28 fighter. Shank had written a letter to his wife, claiming: “They won’t tell you people what we do over here. I'll bet you that anyone you talk to does not know that American pilots fight this war. . . . [The Vietnamese] are stupid, ignorant, sacrificial lambs, and I have no use for them. . . . They’re a menace to have on board.” Shank’s wife released the letter to the press, and it was published nationwide through the wire services.
The air force was building up its sortie count through Operation Ranch Hand as well. American advisers had long complained about the ability of the Vietcong to melt back into the jungles where they could not be located. As early as 1961, Walt Rostow and Robert McNamara learned that army chemists had developed new herbicides; the most powerful was Agent Orange. Here was a technological solution. If the jungle kept advisers and pilots from locating the enemy, then eliminate the jungle. In January 1962 the Kennedy administration had Air Force C-123 aircraft dump defoliants on selected areas of the Ca Mau Peninsula. In 1964 Johnson increased the Ranch Hand sorties. Using the motto “Only you can prevent forests,” Ranch Hand pilots turned more than 100,000 acres of jungle and rice paddies into mud.
By that time the debate between policymakers who saw the war primarily in diplomatic or political terms and others who saw it as a military venture was coming to an end in Washington, and the militarists had the upper hand. That new consensus reflected itself in a number of important personnel changes. Roger Hilsman was the first to go. At the time, he was an assistant secretary of state for Far Eastern affairs and an advocate of the political, “hearts-and-minds” war. President Johnson took an immediate dislike to Hilsman. His close relationship with Robert F. Kennedy, whom Johnson loathed, was one strike against him, and strike two was his opposition to the hard-line approach of Maxwell Taylor and Walt Rostow. Strike three came at a dinner party when Johnson overheard Hilsman insult General Lyman Lemnitzer for losing control of the Vietnam situation in 1960 and 1961. When Hilsman got word that Johnson was about to fire him, he resigned. The president replaced him with William Bundy. The president also exiled W. Averell Harriman. During the Kennedy administration the old diplomat had made himself useful, negotiating the Laotian settlement and shuttling back and forth with messages from Washington. Like everyone else, Harriman did not want to see South Vietnam fall to communism, but he did not think the solution was on the battlefield. The only permanent settlement was political and diplomatic, a position he advocated insistently, much to the anger of Rostow, Rusk, McNamara, and Taylor. And because of Harri-man’s close ties to the Kennedys, Johnson did not “trust him to take out my garbage.” Early in 1964 the president relieved Harriman of his Asian duties and assigned him, in Harriman’s own words, “to the oblivion of African affairs.”
Hilsman and Harriman were gone, and Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., joined them.
By the spring of 1964 Lodge believed that he had completed his assignment in South Vietnam. Lodge was preoccupied with politics at home. A moderate Republican, he worried about the shrill voices of “Barry Goldwater and the Neanderthals” in the GOP’s right wing. He wanted to get back home in time for the presidential primaries, in which, he hoped, he could deny Goldwater the nomination. Lodge even flirted with the idea of a dark-horse candidacy of his own.
After some indecision, Johnson asked Maxwell Taylor to step down as chairman of the joint chiefs and take over the embassy in Saigon. Taylor preached escalation—enough American advisers, money, and air power to win the war. He was convinced that the United States must make the war too expensive for Hanoi to pursue and so bloody for the Vietcong that they could not replace their casualties. The North Vietnamese saw what was happening—the full militarization of the dispute over the future of Vietnam, the dispatching of a major American general to take control of a difficult situation. Vo Nguyen Giap wrote that the “appointment of Taylor to South Vietnam reminds us of such top French generals as De Tassigny and Navarre going to Indochina every time the French Expeditionary Corps was in serious difficulty. Our compatriots in the South and the heroic southern liberation troops . . . will certainly reserve for Taylor . . . the fate our people reserved for the former defeated French generals.” History would repeat itself.
To take the place of Taylor, Johnson appointed the army general Earle G. Wheeler chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Wheeler’s career had been spent in planning and logistics rather than in infantry combat, but he was known as a superb organizer and manager. As deputy chief of the nation’s European command and then as army chief of staff in the early 1960s, Wheeler listened to the debate over the war, but he had few doubts. It was simply a matter of military strength. The United States should crush the Vietcong and the North Vietnamese.
Where the Domino Fell: America and Vietnam 1945-1995 Page 16