The Wars of Watergate

by Stanley I. Kutler

  Johnson struggled to preserve his relationship with “the woman he loved,” despite the incessant demands of his “bitch.” During his last years in office, with inflation soaring nearly out of control, and with the budget deficit at a then-astronomical $25 billion, he finally accepted some restraints on Great Society spending in exchange for a tax surcharge. Valiantly—and successfully—he struggled for a new civil rights bill that among other things prohibited discrimination in the sale and rental of housing.25 But despite that success, the drive for the Great Society was over. The pressures for a wider, more expensive war prevailed after 1965. Curiously, the counterpressures for peace only accelerated the war effort as the President desperately tried to bring Hanoi to the peace table.

  The decision to commit American forces in the Vietnam war, and the subsequent conduct of the war, remain controversial. But the passage of time has not eroded contemporary judgments of friend and foe alike that Lyndon Johnson failed miserably to exercise his vaunted leadership and political skills. He failed to tell the nation that sacrifice was inevitable; he failed to prepare the nation for the protracted war that flowed from his limited pursuit of war aims; more significantly, he failed to inform the nation why it was at war. He committed American men and arms, but he failed to commit the American people to that war.

  And he knew better. Clark Clifford, one of the few men Johnson held in awe, warned in July 1965 that the war was futile. “I don’t believe we can win in South Vietnam,” he said. “If we send in 100,000 more men, the North Vietnamese will meet us. If North Vietnam runs out of men, the Chinese will send in volunteers. Russia and China don’t intend for us to win the war.” Clifford urged that we get out “honorably.” Otherwise, he warned, “I can’t see anything but catastrophe for my country.”

  However valued Clifford may have been, the President soon made it clear that opposition to his policies was a luxury at home and a boon to the enemy. He was sure, he said, that our soldiers did not “think we should enjoy the luxury of fighting each other back home.” But most of all, he heaped scorn on his critics and blithely appealed to patriotic abstractions. “There will be some Nervous Nellies and some who will become frustrated and break ranks under the strain,” the President remarked. There would be those who would “turn on their leaders and on their country and on our fighting men. There will be times of trial and tensions in the days ahead that will exact the best that is in all of us.”26

  Johnson’s patriotic homilies were inadequate. George Washington, at Valley Forge in 1778, warned that whoever built upon patriotism as a sufficient basis for conducting a long and bloody war “will find themselves deceived in the end.” Such a war, Washington insisted, could never be sustained by patriotism alone. “It must be aided by a prospect of Interest or some reward. For a time, it may, of itself push Men to action;… but it will not endure unassisted by Interest.” Nevertheless, Johnson and his advisers “wrapped themselves in the flag,” decrying the “Nervous Nellies” who opposed the war. Deception and self-delusion alike pervaded the Johnson Administration’s conduct of the war.

  Vietnam was not prominent in the first months of the Johnson Administration. The problem still fit into the pattern of continuity with the Kennedy policies. In a telephone conversation on March 2, 1964, Johnson told Senator Fulbright that he would follow Kennedy’s course, and the Senator enthusiastically concurred. If Johnson had any doubts, certainly Fulbright allayed them. The Senate’s foremost foreign-policy spokesman rejected any proposals for negotiations with the North until the American and South Vietnamese bargaining positions had been strengthened. Whether the United States chose to expand the conflict “one way or another,” or confined itself to bolstering the South, he said, required “a continuing examination by responsible officials in the executive branch.” But the Senator’s basic position was simple and blunt: the United States should “continue to defend its vital interests with respect to Vietnam.”27

  That general view had substantial support in early 1964, however imprecise the perception of “vital interests.” The popular media offered no significant opposition. Reporters who would later win Pulitzer Prizes for their criticism of the war were at this point proposing an enlarged commitment. Until late 1967, public-opinion polls consistently demonstrated widespread support for Johnson’s policy, which ostensibly steered a middle course between total war and withdrawal. There is also evidence that the steady escalation in the period after 1964 had solid public approval.28 The margin of public support and approval, however, had to be balanced against a steadily growing opposition that reflected deep divisions within American society.

  Vietnam had historically been a difficult problem. The Chinese and the French had failed to understand, let alone master, the area. American policy-makers had little to guide them besides the well-worn Cold War principle of keeping the dominoes from tumbling, and an unshakable belief that an aggressive Communist China was manipulating its North Vietnamese puppets. Critics who thought the President had not prosecuted the war adequately operated on these premises. Richard Nixon, in a March 1965 speech, argued that the Vietnam war really was a war with China, with all of the Pacific Rim and Asia at stake. Nixon called for bombing in the North and more aid to the South.29

  Little sophisticated analysis was applied to what was a complex situation. The policy that emerged was more the product of default and inertia than of design. Johnson’s challenge to present “viable alternatives” to his policies went unanswered by those increasingly uncomfortable with the drift of events.

  The policy of a limited, contained American involvement in Vietnam was doomed to frustration. Eventually, policy-makers and the country faced the hard choices of expansion or withdrawal. The concept of limited war was consistent neither with the President’s personality nor with the temperament of the American people. The outcome of the Korean War, a decade earlier, had never been understood or accepted; for Vietnam, the American people eventually demanded total victory or withdrawal. Curiously, Johnson himself on occasion recognized the difficulties. He was acutely aware of Harry Truman’s experience with public opinion and the Korean War. In his January 1965 message to Congress, Johnson warily warned that “we may have to face long, hard combat or a long, hard conference, or even both at once.”

  The truths and realities of Vietnam were hard to understand; they were even harder to explain. Johnson’s concern for ensuring his popularity left no space for such frankness. Thus, much of the expanding American commitment occurred amid secrecy that in turn was a handmaiden to deception. For four years, the Johnson Administration carried out an extensive air war in Laos, hidden from most of the Congress and the public.30 Laos typified the Administration’s working combination of secrecy and deception rather than candid explanations of policies and goals. The subsequent cost of that style proved terribly high.

  The intractability of the Vietnam war, and Johnson’s conduct of it, undermined his cherished preference for consensus-building. The war’s frustrations inevitably produced a swelling chord of domestic dissent. For Johnson, there was no response except to harden his position. His view of consensus “had come to mean balancing existing forces rather than bending them into new shapes.” Imaginative solutions were cast aside as the President desperately sought public approval, even if securing approval required dissembling and the stifling of dissident views. Johnson had hoped that if he had “to turn back I want to make sure I am not in too deep to do so.” By 1967, however, he was deep in the Vietnam “mud.” “We face more cost, more loss, more agony,” he reported in his 1967 State of the Union message. The result was that the master of crafty, pragmatic politics now emerged as a rigid ideologue, seemingly unresponsive to emerging political realities.31

  The pressures on Johnson came in equal measure from those who wanted to “win” the war and those who wanted to end American involvement—“hawks” and “doves” were the simple labels given the players. The doves—largely the liberal intelligentsia—were more articulate
and vocal than their adversaries, yet less effective in influencing the President. University campuses and classrooms, political journals, and literary magazines offered convenient forums for denouncing Johnson as a “preternatural villain, a monster who had seized on domestic liberalism as a cover for his stupid (or cunning, depending on the writer’s needs) intervention in Vietnam.” In time, the President and these critics passed the realm of dialogue and descended into shrill, often insulting, characterizations of each other’s views. Johnson responded with more bitterness, more isolation, more bombs, and more insistence that he was right and that history would vindicate him.32

  Criticism from hawks seemed less overt; yet it may have had more impact. Goldwater’s 1964 position sparked enough fear and trembling in Administration circles to contribute to the first significant escalation of the war. Johnson kept a wary eye on the right wing—the “great lurking monster,” as he once characterized it. An aide revealed that Johnson feared merciless attacks from conservatives if he left South Vietnam destabilized. The Left, he was certain, could be contained or more easily satisfied; a Right that capitalized on his foreign-policy failures, however, might well imperil his cherished Great Society.

  The military represented an uncertain quantity to Johnson. Was there possibly another Douglas MacArthur lurking in the wings? Admiral Thomas Moorer, a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, grumbled at the restraints the President had imposed on the use of military power and his close superintendence of that use. Moorer advocated an amphibious assault on the North, or even just the credible threat of one. The North, he realized, could deploy most of its troops in the South without having to fear any strike against its home terrain. “They didn’t believe it at first, and then, finally, they came to the conclusion that we were really that stupid,” Moorer later complained.

  Lady Bird Johnson, the President’s wife, afterward recalled that the major pressure came from such congressional conservatives as Senators Russell, Stennis, Byrd, and Thurmond—“people demanding that we get this thing over with by dropping the deadliest of bombs.” The President listened to them. He was used to accommodating his former Senate cronies as if he were still Majority Leader. And then in Green Bay, Wisconsin, in February 1968, Republican candidate Richard Nixon must have sent a chill down Johnson’s spine when he sounded the same note, insisting that the only effective way to force Hanoi to the bargaining table was to “prosecute the war more effectively.”33

  Johnson was described by a contemporary as “king of the river and a stranger to the sea.”34 He was a clever navigator of the congressional stream, paddling deftly through its pools and eddies, ever alert for the occasional sandbar. But in the open sea of foreign policy, with its shifting, almost imperceptible currents, its swells and tempests—there he was out of his depth. He could not be the master he wished to be, and this only embittered and frustrated him more. What he knew best did not apply in these unpredictable waters. International politics was not domestic politics writ large.

  The concern over Johnson’s policies in Southeast Asia eventually went beyond his personality, raising the issue of the nature and power of the presidency itself. That power had come a long way from the pristine handiwork of the framers of the Constitution. The history of presidential power is a history of aggrandizement; the transformation of the office in the twentieth century alone has been remarkable.35 Economic dislocation, global wars, and the assumption of world leadership have focused power in the presidency, and with it the rapt attention of a fascinated, often adoring, public.

  The expansion of presidential power was by and large welcomed and approved, and perhaps nowhere more eagerly than in the liberal and academic communities. Richard Neustadt, a former presidential aide and a leading student of the institution, suggested that the new powers and responsibilities of the modern presidency dictated a new constitutional view. By 1964, the old constitutional partnership between executive and legislative branches on the crucial questions of war and peace had been modified by new technology. The president, Neustadt argued, was the only one in the system “capable of exercising judgment under the extraordinary limits now imposed by secrecy, complexity, and time.” The president must be the man in charge; he must, Neustadt concluded, “stretch his personal control, his human judgment, as wide and deep as he can make them reach.”

  One of Neustadt’s critics noted that such behavior ordinarily would reflect “excessive, even pathological, vanity and opportunism.” Neustadt wrote largely to applaud John F. Kennedy’s self-image as president, the image Kennedy sought to project both within government and in the public arena. But Kennedy never really fulfilled his own image. Johnson, however, made it living, striking reality—and found that the celebrants of a strong presidency no longer were so certain or so forthcoming in their approval.36

  In his maiden speech to the Senate in March 1949, Lyndon Johnson had warned that the modern president, with his “virtually unlimited powers of influence,” and the unchecked power of his aides, represented “a force well-nigh irresistible.” Senator Johnson, of course, saw all this as potential tyranny, and with a typically exaggerated rhetorical flourish, pictured the Senate as offering, if necessary, “the precious last-ditch fighters for freedom against a tyrannical president.” Sixteen years later, he confidently asserted that he need not have the concurrence of Congress for his actions in Vietnam. “The authority of the president is very clear and unquestioned without a resolution,” he said. “The Commander in Chief has all the authority that I am exercising.” And a year later, in July 1966, he told a crowd that his election meant that while many could advise and a few had to consent to his policies, only he had “been chosen by the American people to decide.” He was that “force well-nigh irresistible.”37

  Executive power once seen as beneficent was now perceived as arrogance, as the war and criticism of it steadily expanded in tandem. Johnson loved the limelight, often demanding it from others more deserving. But suddenly he found himself an unwanted center of attention as the situation in Vietnam deteriorated. At issue now were his war, his mounting casualties, his inadequate or misguided bombing raids, and his soaring inflation. Just as Johnson had exaggerated his power, critics equally exaggerated his responsibility for their frustrations.

  The war effort itself, of course, was a casualty of the growing dissent. Equally important, perhaps, there was widespread questioning—most significantly, from the liberal forces in America—of a presidency that perhaps was too unbridled, too unchecked, and just too powerful.38 The longstanding public unease and disquietude with Johnson took on added dimensions. He had rapidly expended the huge political capital he had gained in 1964. Now he was perceived as a man who had both lost control and was out of control. The combination was fatal.

  The first month of 1968 portended the “continuous nightmare,” as Johnson later characterized the final year of his presidency. It was, he said, “one of the most agonizing years any President ever spent in the White House.”39 By then, he interpreted assaults against the United States as personal humiliations, even when his fault was minimal or the enemy’s victory dubious. On January 23, 1968, North Korea—perhaps North Vietnam’s prototype in Johnson’s eyes—seized the USS Pueblo, a highly sophisticated spy ship. One week later, the North Vietnamese and their Viet Cong allies unleashed the Tet offensive. No matter who might have been the immediate or long-range military victor of the Tet engagements, the sight on American television screens of an enemy assault in the courtyard of the American Embassy in Saigon only deepened public frustration with the war.

  Perception was taken as reality, and the perception throughout much of the world and in the United States was that the United States and its South Vietnamese ally had been mortally humiliated. Tet actually resulted in severe losses for the enemy once American troops struck back with a counteroffensive. But the North Vietnamese boldness and audacity belied repeated assurances from Johnson and General William Westmoreland that the war was being won. Tet’s most conspi
cuous casualty was the President.40

  At best, the Vietnam war was difficult to explain or understand; Tet stands out as one of the more complex moments. It simply could not be treated definitively with each successive day of a journalist’s deadline. The sight of Viet Cong troops swarming through the American Embassy compound was indeed stunning and unforgettable, but it may have been more symbol than substance. The television reporter from Saigon who had negotiated that precious ninety seconds from his network could not explore much below the surface sensationalism. Even if he had, chances are his words would not have correlated with the spectacular film of fire fights in the embassy’s courtyard. The ultimate reality for the President and his advisers was that three of every four Americans received their news in this way.

  Tet truly was a media event. Journalists hastily praised the enemy offensive for its discipline, organization, and success—judgments not necessarily in accord with reality. Later studies demonstrated that the North Vietnamese and their Viet Cong allies had not executed their plans very effectively and that, in fact, American and South Vietnamese troops had fought well. Without doubt, the media’s “major distortion of reality—through sins of omission and commission—… helped shape Tet’s political repercussions in Washington and the administration’s response.”41 Meanwhile, television showed a South Vietnamese police chief publicly executing a Viet Cong guerrilla in another shocking image which generated widespread revulsion.

  The antiwar movement gained its apostolic benediction on February 27, 1968. CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite—oft cited as the “most trusted man in America”—journeyed to Vietnam following the Tet offensive to survey the war’s progress. His judgment was emphatic and stunning: “It seems now more certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate.” Johnson allegedly told his Press Secretary that if he had lost Cronkite he had lost “Mr. Average Citizen.” Cronkite in effect put his imprimatur on a rising feeling that the war was no longer worth the effort. Clearly, the public was no longer in a mood to tolerate Johnson’s handling of the struggle. While national support for the war stayed at about the 45 percent level between November 1967 and March 1968, approval of the President’s conduct sank to an abysmal 26 percent.42 Tet, it seemed, was his fault.