The Best and the Brightest (Modern Library)

by David Halberstam

  What was important was that the step had been taken at a very considerable price. The Secretary of Defense would mislead the Congress on a number of specific points, and the most important point of all, the role of the covert operations in initiating the entire prolonged Tonkin episode, was omitted from discussion (in his autobiography Johnson would later pass over this very lightly, claiming that on August 3 McNamara had fully briefed the Senate leaders on the 34A operations. It was simply not true). Thus the crisis atmosphere and the issue of the flag seemed to dominate the proceedings; the Communists had provoked us, as Communists were wont to do; obviously we had to respond, to show firmness. But the full story, that we and our American-owned proxies had been provoking them at the time they retaliated, was left out. It was a crucial omission, for it colored the entire subsequent debate, and allowed the Administration to use the most potent of all weapons in the proceedings, the issue of the flag. Had the real story been known, there would surely have been full Senate hearings, and the more they dragged on, the more they would have cast doubt on the President’s position. In private testimony before the Senate committees at the time, McNamara had gone out of his way to dissociate the Maddox patrol from the 34A missions; similarly he was disingenuous to the point of open dishonesty about what the mission of the 34A boats was, what the extent of U.S. control of their missions was, and what his own knowledge of 34A day-to-day operations was (he was fully informed, as was Rusk).

  It was not surprising that years later a reporter interviewing Wayne Morse, by then an ex-senator, would find him more intense in his retrospective anger toward Fulbright than toward Johnson; Fulbright, Morse thought, had played the game when he should have known, and in fact did know, better. But as part of an overall consensus, the hold on the Congress was very thin, as thin as the wording in the resolution was vague. Fulbright would feel that he had been lied to and misled, and finally, with great misgivings—going against the advice of his more conservative Senate staff, and with the urging of his committee staff, he began a series of speeches that would lead to a major break with the Administration. The relationship, once so warm (“To J. William Fulbright, than whom there is no better,” Johnson had recently autographed a photo), would become bitter and hostile. Knowing that Fulbright liked to be on the inside, Johnson deliberately tried to isolate him, to mock him in private, calling him “the stud duck of the opposition”; and he would talk to friends of Fulbright’s laziness, his vanity. Fulbright in turn dissented first in speeches, and then, by early 1966, with major hearings on the war, calling a series of forceful and eloquent witnesses, Kennan, Gavin, and others.

  If at that time the Republican party with its triple tongue of Rockefeller-Nixon-Goldwater was not furnishing the country with intelligent, informed, thoughtful analysis of the war, and it was not, then no matter, because the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, reluctantly or no, had become the center of opposition. The opposition to the war, kindled there, would help turn the country and particularly the crucial liberal-egghead wing of the Democratic party against the war, and would lead, to a very considerable degree, to Lyndon Johnson’s withdrawal from the 1968 race. And if the Senate and Fulbright had been noted for their lack of assertiveness in the serious questioning of American foreign policy, then that era ended with the Tonkin Resolution. A new age would dawn, in which all the major assumptions of American foreign policy would be challenged, and Bill Fulbright, the least likely adversary for Johnson, feeling personally betrayed, would become the leader of a hostile and bitter opposition which no longer believed anything emanating from the White House. The resurgence of a real and independent U.S. Senate on the foreign policy of the United States would date from Tonkin. The old order, the assumption that the executive branch knew better because it was privy to better inside information, would end, as would the corollary, that the President of the United States could be trusted. For Lyndon Johnson, the Tonkin Gulf Resolution was a victory, but like so many things he was to do in the coming year, it produced short-range gains with far more serious long-range problems. (However, ironically, the lack of legal authority for the war continued to bother not just the critics of the war but the President as well, and in 1965, as the escalation mounted, he turned to Nicholas Katzenbach, the Attorney General, and asked, “Don’t I need more authority for what I’m doing?” Katzenbach assured him that he did not, that on a legal basis he had all the authority he needed with the Tonkin Resolution. But Johnson was still bothered by the idea, and he raised the same point with his congressional liaison people and his friends on the Hill, and they told him not to go for more legal justification, that he would get hit from two sides: by the people who opposed him on the war, and by those who supported him but thought they had given him enough authority already.)

  Johnson had not moved precipitously on the congressional resolution, as some on his staff had wanted, rather he bided his time; and when the right moment came, he taught the North Vietnamese a lesson (“touched them up” was the phrase which he would use from time to time). So they knew they were dealing with Lyndon B. Johnson, a man to be reckoned with, a man who was not afraid of force and who would lay it on the table. At the same time he had got the Congress over to his side, silenced the dissenters, locked up the press, and even locked up poor Barry Goldwater, who after some phone calls endorsed the Johnson approach to Tonkin. Johnson was hailed as a man of wisdom, balance and restraint; the contrast with Goldwater, who seemed anxious to turn all problems over to the Joint Chiefs, was marked. Here was a man of restraint, a man of judicious force, neither of the left nor of the right. But if Tonkin made things easier it was because it was a fraud; it left the President with the illusion that he could use force, and use it effectively, simply by turning it on and off, that he could get in and get out without any fuss, that he could teach the North Vietnamese a lesson and they had no response (which was not true, they would immediately respond to the Tonkin incident, showing anyone who cared that when kicked, they would kick back—indeed Tonkin itself had been precipitated by an instance in which they had retaliated at a destroyer because of actions against them. Tonkin was not just an escalation on our part, it was an escalation on their part as well, showing that they would meet force with force). That was one illusion; the second was that consensus warmaking worked, that the President could get all but the extremes to agree to a judicious way of going to war, and that it would hold as long as he took the center, and that he could rally and strengthen his position by force; and finally, that as he had been in control during Tonkin, controlling the response to the North Vietnamese attack and gaining just what he wanted domestically with it, the President could continue to stay in control, to use events to his advantage.

  Although Johnson’s success was an illusion, the short-range results were remarkable. The polls were better than ever, the press comment was better than ever (even Walter Lippmann seemed pleased, because Lippmann, a believer in an American policy of blue water and clear skies for the Pacific, that is, staying out of land wars, thought Johnson was signaling the limits of the United States in a Pacific war rather than just the beginning). “In a single stroke Mr. Johnson has, at least temporarily, turned his greatest political vulnerability in foreign policy into one of his strongest assets,” wrote Lou Harris, the pollster, on August 10. No less than 85 percent of the nation approved the raids. In July, Harris noted, 58 percent of the nation had criticized Johnson’s handling of the war, while after Tonkin public opinion virtually reversed itself, and 72 percent approved. More and more people, Harris found, wanted us to take the war to the North (though of course there was very little polling about what that meant, whether we should take the war to the North if it meant a prolonged and bloody ground war in the bargain).

  But Tonkin protected Johnson from the one issue which he had feared and where events might slip away from his control. While it had improved his standing in the polls, it had, ironically, sharpened the differences between him and Goldwater (and it had both in his mind
and the minds of the men around him convinced them of their right and their capacity as well to manipulate the American people and the Congress). Having handled, he thought, the Congress, the people and the enemy, the way was clear now to his own Presidency. In late summer he moved away from the shadow of Jack Kennedy, his own legislative program and his foreign problems, to run for the Presidency as his own man, for the Johnson years, and he did it joyously and with zest. It was no wonder that he loved running in 1964, a chance to bask in the kind of national admiration he had never received before, though the admiration was at least as much anti-Goldwater as it was pro-Johnson; Goldwater had done for Johnson what Johnson could never do for himself. He had magnified those Texas virtues and minimized those Texas warts; the warts disappeared not so much because they were no longer there, but because the press and the public in the summer and fall of 1964 chose not to see them. Rather, the virtues became evident; Johnson was frequently described as a healing man, indeed he would refer to one of his main speeches as the one in which he was “healing the wounds.” He was the man who could bring the different regions together, who could overcome his own regional prejudices if the nation would overcome its prejudices against him. Roy Wilkins would say of him, yes, the President seemed to be a great man destined for great things, but that Texas accent did make him, Wilkins, a little uneasy; and no less a figure than Martin Luther King, Jr., saw more hope for him, more commitment from him for Negro rights than from John Kennedy, King seeing in Johnson a desire to cleanse a soul.

  His energies became almost mythological; they were our energies, his dreams were our dreams. Business leaders came over to him, made uneasy not by Goldwater’s preference for free enterprise, but by their fear that in blowing up the Kremlin men’s room, he might blow up their factories as well. The young did not protest him. He sat at a mass rally in Detroit with Walter Reuther on one side of him and Henry Ford on the other. Was it possible? Was this the land where our fathers had struggled? “I never had it so good,” he said that day in Detroit. To visitors at the White House he loved to show slides of people reaching out to him at campaign rallies. “Look at them,” he would say. “Just look at them.” Negroes, in their last year of being content to be known as Negroes, rallied to his side. More than rally—“Those Negroes cling to my hands like I was Jesus Christ walking in their midst,” he told friends. He was for one magic moment what he had always wanted to be, the centrist consensus candidate, loved by all his people. He savored it, becoming expansive in the riches that the campaign brought to him; he had the issues locked up. There were only three national concerns, anyway, he told reporters traveling with him on the plane. “Everybody worries about war and peace. The men worry about heart attacks and the women worry about cancer of the tit.”

  It was all his; Jack Kennedy had started it and Lyndon Johnson had finally put it together and held it together and now he was reaping its dividends. To James Cannon, a reporter from Newsweek, which was jointly owned by the Washington Post, he would mockingly complain about the Post’s treatment of him and then open the paper, where there were eight stories on the front page, three editorials about him, all favorable, and three columnists praising his wisdom. As Johnson went through the paper, checking off the stories, his grin began to grow, and he finally said, “See? Nothing but a house organ.” And to Charles Mohr, the White House correspondent for the New York Times, who, when granted an interview and finding nothing of great import to ask about, all great issues settled momentarily, asked about some internal White House procedural question, Johnson laughed and said, “Here you have a chance to interview the President of the United States and the leader of the entire free world. And you ask a chickenshit question like that.”

  As the campaign progressed, even the greatest sophisticates in the country, the New York jet set, rallied to his cause, opened a discothèque called the LBJ, where chic young people danced beneath giant photos of that somewhat mournful face. Everywhere he campaigned the crowds were good and they responded to him, to the good life he was bringing them. He cast aside the security advice of the Secret Service people, and surged into the throng, and they loved him and he gave back his warmth and his energy. The times were good now and there were better ones, golden years, ahead. His record would make people forget Kennedyism—oh, a few snobs, the Georgetown Ivy Leaguers, might remember how they had danced in those brief years, but the rest of the nation would be reading about the Great Society and Lyndon Johnson and what he had done for all of the people. It was no wonder he tried to keep Vietnam out of his mind, as far from a place of debate as possible. When someone asked him later why he had not involved the public more in the question of Vietnam, he was told: “If you have a mother-in-law with only one eye and she has it in the center of her forehead, you don’t keep her in the living room.”

  Oh, to run against Barry Goldwater, he of the quick tongue and the quick atomic trigger. It was not that he actually advocated nuclear war, it was just that he talked about nuclear war so much that he seemed to be advocating it (reporters covering Goldwater noted that in one thirty-minute speech alone, Goldwater mentioned nuclear weapons, war and devastation twenty-six times). In the past, Lyndon Johnson knew, there had been doubts in the public mind about him, not doubts about the Johnsonian ability to get things done, but about his ethical sense, doubts about his restraint, doubts stemming from his Texanisms. But Goldwater, the man of the real right, cleansed him of his sins; the more Goldwater campaigned, the better it was for Lyndon Johnson, a rare case where exposure of your opponent was a blessing. In case there was any question about what Goldwater might do with the issue of the war, the Administration was careful to send a young naval officer in civilian clothes to Goldwater’s headquarters each day to pick up his advance speeches; thus the Administration was prepared to answer any charge on the war almost before Goldwater made it. If Tonkin had tied up the nation, it had also tied up Goldwater, good old-fashioned patriot that he was. So Barry Goldwater made it possible for Johnson to run as he had always wanted and as he felt most comfortable, not as a man of ideology or region, but as someone who simply wanted to do good for all the folks. It was a lovely thing to watch, Lyndon out there, healing the wounds, as he put it.

  The signs were good everywhere, in the polls, in the people who came to the White House. He was ebullient; he loved calling people into the White House, showing them the polls, and telling them what it would mean in the next session of Congress. He was going to win and win big, and he was going to get a real Congress, and there was nothing in his way. “We’ll have nine, eh, maybe even eighteen months before the Hill turns around on us,” he would say. “We have that much time to get it all through.” And then he talked of his plans, his dreams, what he would do, the education legislation, the housing program, the domestic vision, and he pushed his domestic staff to work harder and harder on domestic legislation, driving them relentlessly, always aware of the limits of time. “When you win big,” he would say, recalling Franklin Roosevelt’s experience, “you can have anything you want for a time. You come home with that big landslide and there isn’t a one of them who’ll stand in your way. No, they’ll be glad to be aboard and to have their photograph taken with you and be part of all that victory. They’ll come along and they’ll give you almost everything you want for a while and then they’ll turn on you. They always do. They’ll lay in waiting, waiting for you to make a slip and you will. They’ll give you almost everything and then they’ll make you pay for it. They’ll get tired of all those columnists writing how smart you are and how weak they are and then the pendulum will swing back.”

  So you had that time and you had to use it, and he wanted everyone ready; when they came out of the election he wanted it all lined up. Then sometimes, when the others were gone, he would turn to the men around him and continue to talk about the Congress, and he would do something rare for him in those days, he would mention Vietnam. You had to control the Congress and keep it in line, keep it from thinking it could run
over you. From smelling blood on you. That meant controlling Vietnam, keeping it down. If you didn’t handle Vietnam, the Congress would know and would strike at you, and would lose its respect for you. If he seemed weak as a President in dealing with Vietnam, he was sure it would undermine him politically. Hell, Truman and Acheson had lost China, and maybe it wasn’t their fault, but they were blamed for it, and when it happened the Republicans in Congress were waiting and jumped on it, and Truman lost the Congress and then the country—it hadn’t happened over domestic issues, remember that, he said, and Truman and Acheson were as strong anti-Communists as anyone he knew. Well, he did not want the blame for losing Vietnam, it might mean the loss of other things he wanted. So Vietnam became more than just a piece of terrain, it was something linked to the rest of his program, to his whole Presidency. Something you had to watch. It might not do you a lot of good, but it sure as hell, he said, could do you a lot of harm.

  At the convention, his convention, there had been barely any challenge to his supremacy. Some kids and some Negroes from Mississippi tried to get in, tried to stir up trouble, trouble that would only help Goldwater, so he calmed them down, in his usual way, telling the liberals it was their job to take care of that Mississippi business, or else their man, Hubert Humphrey, would suffer. That was the price. And so they had quieted down the Mississippi people, and Humphrey had been on the ticket (“My link to the bomb throwers,” he had called Humphrey in the old days when he used him as an opening to the Senate left, though Humphrey was far from a bomb thrower any more), and it was one more victory for centrist pluralist politics over the extreme fringe.