So they lost it all. There was a sense of irony here, as if each player had lost, not just a major part of his personal reputation, but much of what he had truly believed in and wanted, much of what he had manipulated for in the first place. Johnson of course had never wanted to go to war, he had become a war President reluctantly, in large part because he feared that otherwise he would lose the Great Society. He had instead gotten the war, but the Great Society was stillborn, it lacked his time, his resources, his second term to bring it to any genuine effectiveness. Which he was bitterly aware of. (In 1969 when a former Pentagon official named Townsend Hoopes wrote a book on how Clark Clifford had turned the war policy around, Johnson was furious with the book. “Hoopees! Hoopees! Who the hell is Hoopees? Here I take four million people out of poverty and all I ever hear about is Hoopees.”) The one thing he could not admit was that he had miscalculated on Vietnam, that Clifford had subsequently turned him around, and that the war had driven him out of office. The knowledge that this was true led to the suspension of his friendship with Clifford for several years, and the closer anyone came to telling the truth, the more Johnson bellowed in anger. He had, it seemed, in his version of events always been in control; everything had worked out as he intended it to.
For McNamara, the great dream had been of controlling the Pentagon and the arms race, but the war had ruined all that. War Secretaries do not limit the power of the military, and to a large degree he had lost control. The war absorbed so much of his time, his energy, his credibility, that he had little to give to the kind of controls he might have wanted. It was not by accident that his name would come more to symbolize the idea of technological warfare than it would civilian control of the military.
McGeorge Bundy was a rationalist in an era which saw the limits of rationalism and which rekindled the need for political humanism; the man of operations and processes in an Administration which seemed to undermine the limits of the processes without moral guidelines. But above all he was a man of the Establishment, the right people deciding on the right policies in the right way, he believed in the capacity and the right of an elite to govern on its terms. The war changed all that; it not only tarnished his personal reputation so that his endorsement of an idea or a candidate had to be done covertly, but it saw a major challenge to the right of the elite to rule. In the Senate, the leading doves believed they had been wiser than the executive branch, and they were beefing up their staffs and playing a larger role in foreign policy. Too, the years had made all the other political groups in the country aware of just how little a part they played in foreign policy, and by the end of the decade the outlanders, Negroes, women, workers, were determined to play a greater role; they had reached the moat and were pressing on.
Dean Rusk had believed not so much in the class as in the policies, mutual security, strong political and military involvement everywhere in the world to stop totalitarians. The war, of course, had brought on a new sense of the limits of power, and with that a growing attitude about the need for the United States to roll back its commitments, which Rusk and others deemed to be a new isolationism. If anything, to a new generation of Americans the war had blurred the differences between the democracies and the totalitarian states. Thus the war, rather than setting the precedent of what the United States had done in the past and would continue to do in the future in the world, had symbolized to growing numbers of Americans what the United States must never do again. It reversed all the traditional directions of American foreign policy, and for Rusk this was a far more bitter thing than the personal abuse which he had suffered.
Max Taylor had always believed in the liberal society and the citizen-democratic Army, a professional army respected by its citizenry, the best kind of extension of a healthy society. The Army would contain the finest young men of the society, well-educated civilized young officers, and this very fact would temper old civilian suspicions and alienations. The war of course had ravaged the Army; the kind of officer Taylor sought for the Army suffered because of it and was increasingly driven out of service. A bad war means a bad system; the wrong officers are promoted for the wrong reasons, the best officers, often unable to go along with the expected norm, the fake body count, the excessive use of force, wither along the way. And the gap between the Army and the society as a whole did not close, it widened; there was a growing sense of antimilitary feeling in the country, and the Army was of course selected as a scapegoat.
The Democratic party too was damaged. It had been hiding from its past at the very beginning of the Kennedy era, unwilling to come to terms with China and what had happened there, and in large part it had gotten into trouble in Vietnam because it accepted the Dulles policies in Asia. But Dulles policies or no, it was the Democrats who had brought us into Vietnam, and the sense of alienation between the party and not just the young but millions of other nominal Democrats was very large. American life was changing very quickly and the party was adjusting very slowly; it seemed increasingly an outmoded corroded institution, its principal spokesmen figures of the past.
Such as Hubert Humphrey, who was one more victim of the war. He had of course always wanted to be the Democratic nominee for the Presidency and he had finally received the nomination one terrible night in Chicago, but by that time it was no longer worth anything (there was a certain irony in this too, because he had sought it so long and feverishly and promiscuously as to be unworthy of it). He was nominated in Chicago on a night when police hacked the heads of the young, and Humphrey’s only response was to kiss the television set. He had gained the nomination and in so doing lost most of what was left of his reputation.
But it was Lyndon Johnson who had lost the most. He had always known this, even in the turbulent days of 1964 and 1965 when the decisions on the war seemed to press on him; even then he was more dubious than those around him, knowing that of them, he had the most to lose. And he lost it, so much of his reputation, so much of his dreams. He could not go to the 1968 Democratic convention, it was all too painful and explosive; nor did he attend the 1972 convention either. There at Miami Beach the Democrats had hung huge portraits of their heroes of the past in the main hall, photos of Presidents and national candidates. But Lyndon Johnson’s photo was not among them, rather it could be found in a smaller room where photos of past congressional leaders hung. He had always dreamed of being the greatest domestic President in this century, and he had become, without being able to stop it, a war President, and not a very good one at that.
A Final Word
In the days, weeks and months after his withdrawal from the race and his decision to cut back on the bombing, Lyndon Johnson was immobilized on the war and so was his Administration. He had been most at ease with a consensus policy, a policy in which all the very great men agreed on the essential wisdom of one centrist idea, and now this consensus was openly and finally shattered, his government totally and irreconcilably divided, and he simply could not come to terms with the division. Events had forced him to set a limit on the American escalation, which he had done reluctantly, though his own generals had warned that even at the current rate of commitment of more than 500,000 Americans, the war might drag on indefinitely. So he had at once limited the war, but he could not make the next step which might see the liquidation of it politically. Perhaps there was simply too much of his own ego involved in it. So the policy on the war was in a kind of suspension.
Clifford at Defense and Harriman in Paris, as the summer of 1968 passed into the fall, were pushing very hard for the kind of political decisions which would see diminishing importance placed on the wishes of the Saigon government, with the United States, if need be, ready to by-pass Saigon. Similarly, in Saigon, Ellsworth Bunker was emerging as a singularly strong proponent of the Thieu regime who felt that in the wake of the Tet offensive we had to strengthen rather than weaken Saigon, and he was arguing forcefully that at this late date we could not let go of Thieu, that the regime was legitimate, and more, viable. Bunker, a man with a
n awesome reputation of his own, was a strong and forceful player, and in a divided bureaucracy his word was crucial. He was picking up the support of both Rusk and Rostow, thereby effectively neutralizing the work of Clifford and Harriman. In March and April, Clifford had won the first round; now the second round, whether or not to keep going on the disengagement of Americans whether Saigon liked it or not, was going to Bunker. This did not stop Clifford from fighting; he was arguing that we had to continue to de-escalate, that it was important not just to limit the commitment but to end it, that Saigon was not in any true sense an ally, that its legitimacy was dubious, that reality was that the United States had overreached itself in Vietnam and now we had to admit it and adjust to it. But Johnson was unable to resolve his new dilemma. With Saigon dragging its feet on negotiations, Clifford prodded everyone along during the fall and publicly criticized the Thieu regime. He was clearly trying to set a new policy for the Administration and move into the vacuum, letting Saigon know that if it wanted any kind of deal at all, it would have to bend as the United States was now bending. Clearly, Clifford was hoping that the President would follow his lead, but Johnson was too deep into the war and he was not that anxious to admit that this ally, for whom he and his country had sacrificed so much (an ally which had in effect cost him his Presidency), was not a worthy ally, not a real government in a real country. In effect, Clifford was arguing the same things that George Ball had advocated four years earlier, but with so many more chips already in the poker game that it was too painful for Johnson to accept the argument of cutting his losses. He could not split off from Saigon, and Saigon was of course holding back on negotiations precisely because it sensed that Nixon would be elected and that he would be easier to deal with than Humphrey (in his memoirs, Johnson would lament Thieu’s obstreperous behavior at this point, saying that it was the first time Saigon had failed to come through for him; which it was, though of course it was the first time he had asked them for anything).
Johnson stayed strictly neutral during the campaign. Though Humphrey was in a sense his political protégé, the President seemed less than anxious to do him any special favors, in part because the issue of the war was in his mind so transcending that he did not want to play politics with it, and in part, friends of his sensed, because he had interior doubts about Humphrey’s capacity to run the country, at least by Johnsonian standards—was Humphrey tough enough?
It was a view of the campaign not unlike that of Richard Nixon, who had feared a race against Johnson and the White House but who seemed to relax now that his opponent was Hubert Humphrey. It was like running against Johnson without Johnson. Humphrey bore the burden of the Johnson years without the strengths; he had the visible stamp of Johnson, he carried the albatross of the war and the divisions that the war had brought to his party; he seemed, in all, a palpably weak candidate. So Nixon decided to run a do-nothing, say-nothing campaign. The Democrats were divided on Vietnam, the Republicans were not; Vietnam was a problem for the Democrats, not for the Republicans. He did not spell out his policies, in large part because he had none. He contented himself with telling audiences that he had a plan to end the war, even touching his breast pocket as if the plan were right there in the jacket—implying that to say what was in it might jeopardize secrecy. The truth was that he had no plan at all. Throughout the campaign his unwillingness to develop a serious substantive policy on Vietnam, which was, after all, the issue tearing the country apart, was the bane of some of his younger staff members. They were repeatedly pushing him to deal with the war, what it meant, why it had gone wrong, but they found him singularly unresponsive. To the degree that he showed his feelings on the war, particularly early in the campaign, he seemed as hawkish as the Administration. He talked about his belief that the war would be brought to a successful conclusion and that the Tet offensive, which had been launched in January 1968, was simply a last-ditch effort by an exhausted enemy. His staff soon convinced him to ease off on his support for the Administration, helped, as it were, by the ferocity with which the NVA and the Vietcong were fighting during the Tet offensive. But the issue for him was not the compelling tragedy it was for so many other Americans, something that you had to come to terms with on its own merits, something where the failure had to be traced and explained to a troubled and divided country; rather it was an issue like others, something to maneuver on, to watch Johnson, Humphrey and Wallace on.
As the Tet offensive dragged on, as dovish and antiwar sentiment mounted in the country even among conservative Republicans (John McCone, Nixon’s staff discovered, thought the United States had to get out of Vietnam. What about loss of prestige? McCone was asked. Well, there would be loss of prestige but it was worse for the United States to stay), the staff moved Nixon to giving what was a reasonably dovish speech on Vietnam. It was prepared by a talented young writer named Richard Whalen who thought the war a hopeless mistake. The speech was scheduled for delivery in early April, but by that time Johnson had withdrawn on Vietnam, so Nixon felt himself under considerably less pressure and canceled it. From then on, though the country was locked in paroxysms of anguish on the war, Nixon sat it out, and at one strategy meeting when Whalen implored his candidate to be candid about Vietnam, insisting that the American people had been seriously lied to and knew they had been lied to, and that Nixon had to challenge the Administration on the war, Nixon listened to Whalen impassively. But there was no response and Whalen thought to himself: “I might just as well be talking to Humphrey. Nixon looks just the way Humphrey must look when his people tell him to break with Johnson.” Discouraged by this attitude, Whalen left the Nixon campaign staff shortly after the Republican convention, but no matter—the Democrats were overwhelmed by problems and the candidate had few of his own. He was convinced that he had Humphrey boxed in on the war; he had a good pipe line to what the Humphrey camp was thinking on the war—pushing the candidate to ask for a bombing halt—and Nixon let Johnson know that he, Nixon, was against the bombing halt. Thus the capacity to split the Democratic party.
In late September the polls showed Nixon leading Humphrey 45 to 30; if he was concerned about anything it was the strength of Wallace, and he was wary of seeming too liberal, too dovish, and thus losing his Southern support. So the campaign was in one sense a repeat of the Tom Dewey campaign, though with far greater technological skill. If Nixon avoided confrontation with the public and with reporters, he nonetheless seemed, by means of carefully controlled televised confrontations with his own supporters, to be meeting people, he seemed to be candid. Meanwhile Humphrey, despite the efforts of his staff to separate him from Johnson, was unable to make the break; he was able to take draft copies of a plan for a new and more independent Vietnam to the President and then unable to show them to the President. “Hubert,” said Larry O’Brien, head of the Democratic party, in August, “paid a high price for being a good boy.” But then, very late in the campaign, and under constant prodding by his staff and his audiences, Humphrey began slowly, painfully, timidly to dissociate himself from Johnson and the war. Suddenly his campaign came alive, money came in. The final vote in November was extremely close: a 15 percent edge in the polls had dwindled to less than 1 percent, Nixon winning 31.77 million to 31.27 million. In part because of his silence and his failure to come to terms with such an awesome issue, Nixon had helped turn a potential landslide into a cliffhanger.
So he was President and he had enjoyed a free ride on Vietnam. He had not announced what his thoughts were on the subject, nor would he be in any hurry to. To Republican doves who had supported him during the campaign he had appeared optimistic about the chances for an end. He had told some of them during the campaign that if he was elected he would end the war within six months. After his election that still seemed to be the timetable; in April 1969 Representative Pete McCloskey of California, who would later challenge Nixon on the war, and Representative Don Riegle of Michigan, who would aid McCloskey in the campaign, went to see Henry Kissinger to plead that the Ad
ministration keep its promise and end the war shortly. Kissinger replied that a breakthrough was imminent. “Be patient,” he said. “Give us another sixty to ninety days. Please stay silent for the time being.” But the first signs of what the Administration’s policy would be had already come from Kissinger himself. Even before Nixon took office, Kissinger, who was the vital national security assistant, had gone around Washington telling friends that the most serious mistake the Johnson Administration had made was the public criticism by Clifford and Harriman of Saigon. In contrast, said Kissinger, the Nixon Administration would move to strengthen the Thieu regime. To many dovish Washington officials who viewed Clifford’s attempt to separate Washington from Saigon as the wisest thing the Johnson Administration had done, and felt that it had, if anything, not gone far enough, what Kissinger was saying was ominous. If Nixon was going to strengthen Saigon, then there would be no real change forthcoming in the political objective of the United States and in what the Administration was offering Hanoi. We might lower our troop level there, but the war would continue the same. Though we would probably cut back on American troops in Vietnam (not out of fondness for the other side, but because American political realities demanded it), we were not offering the other side anything new politically.
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