by Nancy Gibbs
Eisenhower reminded the men that they were playing chess, not checkers. Nuclear weapons had political, psychological, and military uses: if the enemy thinks he can wait you out, he gains the upper hand. He recalled how, after years of stalled negotiations in Korea, he had let it be known, through “secret” channels like India’s neutralist prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, who he knew would leak, that unless an armistice was signed soon, he would no longer put limits on what borders could be crossed or what weapons used, including nuclear. Ike said he warned North Korea that “We make a hell of a lot of weapons. We spent a lot of money on them. What the hell do we make them for if we don’t ever use them, if we have to.” Ike explained that he never intended to do anything except let that view get back to the North Koreans. But it ensured that the North Koreans would want to negotiate with him. (That may have been how he chose to remember it; but in his National Security Council meetings then and later in his presidency, Eisenhower seriously weighed using nuclear weapons in Korea in the event of a Chinese invasion, and worked hard to convince U.S. allies of the legitimacy of their use.)
McNamara pressed him about using tactical nuclear weapons in Vietnam. If the Chinese were to intervene now, Eisenhower said, Johnson should hit them from the air, using whatever force was necessary, including nuclear weapons. He doubted that would happen. But the United States has now put its prestige into keeping Southeast Asia free; if that takes “six to eight divisions . . . so be it.”
So the man who had resisted intervening militarily in Vietnam in 1954 for fear the jungle would swallow whole divisions was now pressing for a much more aggressive posture. “As he had with President Kennedy in 1961,” Clark Clifford argued in his memoirs, “Eisenhower advocated a variety of strong actions which he had never taken when he was president.” Maybe this was just the pattern of former presidents; maybe it reflected how much the circumstances had changed on the ground. But Eisenhower’s advice was consistent, from his days as a general, to his years in the White House, to his role as veteran counselor: don’t fight unless you are in it to win. Don’t waste time and lives with half measures. That had to be a hard message for Johnson to hear, for a man “too sentimental” for the hard decisions, and too uncertain of his ability to sell them. On questions like this, he was less sure-footed, and so more dependent on the “wise men,” whether Eisenhower, or Acheson, or Clifford, to give him cover, prevent him from looking timid or incompetent.
Johnson got the other thing he needed most at that moment: a picture, on the front page of the New York Times, of him and Eisenhower deep in conversation. “Surprise Visitor,” read the caption. No halo shined brighter than Eisenhower’s; if the Republicans’ greatest hero was supporting Johnson, then the president must be doing the right thing.
The Trap
In February of 1965, Johnson quietly approved Operation Rolling Thunder, a sustained bombing campaign named from a verse of his friend Billy Graham’s signature revival anthem, “How Great Thou Art.” Before it was all over the United States would drop more bombs on Vietnam than were used by all parties in all theaters of World War II. The ground troops would soon follow; first two Marine battalions—about 1,500 men—to protect the air bases at Danang, then by the end of April fifty thousand troops, to support the Marines. “The time has come to call a spade a bloody shovel,” wrote James Reston in the New York Times. “This country is in an undeclared and unexplained war in Vietnam.” And yet all the while Johnson insisted that nothing fundamental had changed—the reflex, as Time White House correspondent Hugh Sidey put it, of a president for whom “the shortest distance between two points was a tunnel.”
“I continue to draw strength from our conversations,” Johnson wrote to Ike in March, and added that members of Congress—from both parties—were reassured that they were consulting. “The Republican leaders, especially in Congress, are standing up magnificently,” Johnson said. Goodpaster’s briefings gave Ike the ammunition he needed to help keep nervous Republicans from wandering too far off the reservation. It was the Democrats who were giving Johnson problems. And when liberal Republicans like Jacob Javits urged Johnson to open peace negotiations, Ike shared Johnson’s annoyance: “When I hear talk about negotiations,” Eisenhower told Johnson, “I wonder why people don’t recognize that there must be someone to negotiate with, and there must be someone willing to negotiate.”
After a landmark April speech at Johns Hopkins University offering to open unconditional peace talks and provide $1 billion in development aid, Johnson felt the winds shift in his favor. The Dallas Morning News ran a cartoon showing LBJ in a fighter jet with a bomb in one hand and a billion dollars in the other. Lawmakers called it a masterpiece. Nearly two thirds of voters in the spring of 1965 thought Johnson was doing a good job on the war, even as the number of ground forces rose to 82,000.
But now Johnson faced his next crucial choice. In May, Clifford warned Johnson that getting in any deeper risked getting trapped in “a quagmire.” The South Vietnamese military was disintegrating, the government about to collapse yet again. General William Westmoreland, commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam, sent McNamara a request for 150,000 more troops if he was to “take the war to the enemy.”
“We’re in a hell of a mess,” McNamara told colleagues.
Like Kennedy, Johnson was sensitive to military opinion, Bundy would later explain, and had a hard time giving generals orders—unlike Ike, who “had more stars than they did, and Mr. Truman, because he just didn’t give a damn. . . . I’ve exaggerated in both cases, but still on balance, Truman and Eisenhower, and indeed FDR, had more self-confidence in dealing with their senior military advisers than either Kennedy or Johnson did.”
Johnson wanted to know what Ike thought. “I don’t see that he’s overeager,” he told McNamara on June 10, speaking of Eisenhower. Goodpaster, who would practically be commuting from Washington to Gettysburg every couple of weeks, briefed Eisenhower on Westmoreland’s request, and Johnson asked the former president to come to Washington to weigh in. So on June 30, Eisenhower had lunch with Johnson and McNamara in the White House family quarters. “He’s been mighty helpful,” Lady Bird recorded in her diary, talking about Eisenhower. “I know the grist for their mill. It could only be serious and bad.”
Lady Bird told historian Robert Dallek that the worst thing for her husband was not knowing whether the war was right. “It was just a hell of a thorn stuck in his throat,” she said. He “did not have that reassuring strong feeling that this is right, that he had when he was in the crunch of civil rights or poverty or education. . . . True, you can ‘bear any burden, pay any price’ if you’re sure you’re doing right. But if you do not know you’re doing right . . .,” and she trailed off.
She wasn’t the only one to worry. Johnson’s growing depression was apparent to his close aides. He was having trouble sleeping. “I’m beginning to feel like a martyr,” he told Canadian prime minister Lester Pearson, who came to see him at Camp David, “misunderstood, misjudged by friends at home and abroad.” Press secretary Bill Moyers saw a “tormented man,” full of self-pity and increasing paranoia; this reflected, Moyers said, “the realization about which he was clearer than anyone—that [Vietnam] was a road from which there was no turning back.” Which meant, in effect if not fact, the end of his presidency. Johnson told Moyers he felt he was in “a Louisiana swamp . . . that’s pulling me down.”
“When he said it,” Moyers remembered, “he was lying in bed with the covers almost above his head.” And this was only 1965.
McNamara laid out three options for Johnson, which basically came down to withdrawal, muddling through with about 75,000 troops, or a major escalation. He told Johnson that the Joint Chiefs were all in agreement: give Westmoreland what he wants.
On July 2 as the decision loomed, Johnson pressed McNamara for assurances, if I go all in, give you the 200,000 troops you’re asking for, what guarantees do I have? “Can the Vietcong come in and tear us up and continue this thing indefini
tely and never really bring it to an end?” He called Eisenhower that night just after eleven, wanting certainty, clarity.
“You have to go all out,” Ike told him. “This is a war, and as long as they are putting men down there, my advice is ‘do what you have to do!’” The only chance of any kind of negotiation would come if Johnson resolved that “hell, we’re going to end this and win this thing. . . . We don’t intend to fail.”
“You think that we can really beat the Vietcong out there?” Johnson asked. He knew the domestic terrain so well, knew the ways of Congress and exactly what his Republican rivals needed to be willing to do a deal. He was the virtuoso of means and ends and practical compromise. But he had no such feel for this enemy, or whether his goals were even achievable. “This is the hardest thing,” Ike agreed, since they didn’t even know how many guerrillas they were facing, how many imported troops, how many rebels. But once again he made the stakes plain: “We’re not going to be run out of a free country that we helped to establish.”
Of course Ike might as well have said, “a country that I helped establish.” He had a personal stake in South Vietnam’s independence, even if it was one he had resisted defending militarily when he was in the White House. Following the French defeat in 1954, when Vietnam was divided temporarily by the Geneva Accords, reunion through free elections was planned within a couple of years. But since it was clear that an election would yield a communist government under Ho Chi Minh, the Eisenhower administration blocked reunification and proceeded to build up South Vietnam economically and militarily as a bulwark against the “falling dominoes” of communist aggression. South Vietnam would not have existed as a country if Eisenhower had not effectively created it.
When they finished, Johnson told Eisenhower, “You’re the best chief of staff I’ve got. . . . I’ve got to rely on you on this one.”
In the end Johnson decided that withdrawal would be a disaster and the status quo meant a slow defeat. He would send the troops—200,000 by October—but he wouldn’t tell Congress or the public any more than was absolutely necessary. He didn’t want to admit what it would cost, as he drove one domestic program after another through Congress: aid to education, housing, Medicare, the Voting Rights Act, community development. He didn’t want to admit to a need to raise taxes, or call up 235,000 reservists, or in any way prepare the country for a long and costly war.
And as long as he had Eisenhower’s blessing, maybe he wouldn’t need to—if all he was doing was continuing Eisenhower’s and Kennedy’s policy and honoring their commitments. Every chance he got, Johnson invoked like a talisman the “solemn pledges” of those who had preceded him “to help defend this small and valiant nation.” Johnson was now carrying around in his pocket a copy of that 1954 letter from Ike to Diem that he regularly cited as the source of America’s sacred commitment to defend South Vietnam. He talked about the “great stakes” involved in resisting communist expansion, and framed the escalation as a matter of the nation’s honor. Our commitment, he said, dates back eleven years, through the Kennedy and Eisenhower administrations: “We just cannot now dishonor our word . . . or leave those who believed us and who trusted us to the terror and repression and murder that would follow.”
Thus he set his own trap, by suggesting there was a virtual treaty, solemn promises that he could not walk away from, even if they had not been his. He put not just Vietnam’s future but U.S. credibility on the line. And, of course, his own. As long as he avoided the full national debate, it would never be America’s war; it would be Lyndon Johnson’s war.
This left Ike in an awkward position, since he had never sworn to defend South Vietnam at all costs. Speaking with reporters on August 17, Eisenhower affirmed that “the communists must be stopped in Vietnam . . . [for] it would be harder and tougher to try it somewhere else.” But he gently rejected the notion that Johnson’s actions were basically a consequence of his policies. He had never made a unilateral military commitment to defend Vietnam, he insisted; he had only promised Diem “economic and foreign aid.” He had refused to provide fighter planes to the French forces for fear of becoming directly involved militarily. The “state” of South Vietnam was an artificial creation; how far would he have gone to defend it?
No one would ever know. Eisenhower could say that circumstances had changed, that there was a reason for Johnson to send in the troops that he never had. In any event, voters were reminded that Ike had steered clear of a land war in Asia. “Military Pledge to Saigon Is Denied by Eisenhower” ran the headline in the New York Times.
And now the editorial writers weighed in about what they hinted was a bait and switch by the White House, using Eisenhower as cover for their covert escalation of the war. “Not only was Congressional debate avoided,” chided a New York Times editorial two days later, “but there were repeated denials that such a decision [to send combat troops] had been made. Indeed the whole effort was to make it appear that nothing has changed in American policy since 1954.”
This sent the White House into full damage control mode. He may have been furious at Ike, but he needed him as much as ever. Johnson called Eisenhower right away: “They want to get us in a fight, and they’re not gonna do it, as far as I’m here,” he said of the press corps.
Eisenhower was reassuring. “After all, you know, no one in the international field can be popular everywhere,” he said. “There’s always a lot of people going [who] know all the answers. And I had my share of it, I assure you.”
Bundy wrote a memo to Goodpaster, and made the stakes clear: “Next to the operations in Vietnam themselves, there is nothing more important than the work that President Johnson and President Eisenhower have done over the last 20 months to maintain their close mutual understanding,” he advised. He handed over a packet of materials for Goodpaster to deliver to Eisenhower, including copies of Eisenhower’s letters to Churchill and Diem from 1954, and a speech Ike made to Congress about the founding of SEATO, the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization. The Churchill letter asserted that the expansion of communism into Southeast Asia “would be a grave threat to the whole free community.”
“The President asks that you make these documents available to general Eisenhower,” Bundy told Goodpaster, “not because President Johnson has any interest whatever in making a paper record, but simply because he believes that they show clearly the basic line of policy set forth over the last 10 years by all three presidents. . . . He takes enormous encouragement from his belief that General Eisenhower and he see eye to eye on these fundamental principles.”
That was the veiled threat: but then there was the sweetener, a letter from Johnson affirming Eisenhower’s vital importance to the country and the cause. “No one knows better than you the accumulated demands of the Presidency,” Johnson affirmed. “No one gives more attention than you to the best interests of our country,” he added, and praised him for “the massive weight of your prestige and wisdom.”
He was confident, Johnson said, of the eternal esteem in which Ike would be held: “Patriot, soldier, President, and now as wise counselor to the nation.”
“General Eisenhower was most pleased with the letter,” Goodpaster wrote, after he met with the general the next day, “and referred to it several times.” Eisenhower assured Goodpaster that there was no problem over the issue of continuity and responsibility for Vietnam; the goal has stayed the same, only the means have changed over eleven years. That was fine—but it was the means that mattered most, as Johnson contemplated sending tens of thousands more men into the theater of war.
That day, August 19, 1965, Ike was also meeting with various Republican leaders—including both Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. In a press conference, Eisenhower insisted that any rumors that he was parting ways with Johnson over Vietnam were “rot.” Johnson’s current course was the best under the circumstances, he said, which were much changed since 1954. And at a time of crisis, he added, “there is only one thing a good American can do, and that is support t
he president.” The White House meanwhile said that there was no division between the two presidents and that it “doesn’t consider any effort by anyone else to use General Eisenhower to promote such divisions as serving the national interest.”
Not every Republican agreed, however, and Ford charged that the White House owed Eisenhower an apology for the White House’s “irresponsible insinuation” that he was being “‘used’ by someone as a puppet for political purposes.” He promised that the Republicans in Congress would be releasing a detailed report on the history of the American commitment to Vietnam.
So the White House beat them to it. Before Ford could release his mimeographed “white paper,” produced in such haste that the pages were misnumbered, the White House unfurled a slick, green-covered twenty-seven-page booklet called “Why Vietnam?” Ike declined to endorse the Republican paper on the war’s history. Johnson called him “a tower of strength.”
Despite—or perhaps because of—Goodpaster’s regular briefings, Eisenhower’s concerns were growing. He sensed Johnson’s hesitation, the lack of a firm commitment to the mission, a reluctance to explain or defend it, and a desire to protect his domestic program at all costs. David Eisenhower argues that at some level Eisenhower realized that he was being used. Often when he was in town to see Johnson, he would stop by the office of his old assistant Bryce Harlow to preview the meeting, and they would ride over to the White House together. “All the way over,” Harlow told David, “the General would bitch and moan and groan about ‘Johnson is using me.’” Sometimes Harlow suspected he’d turn around and head back to Gettysburg. “But at the Diplomatic Reception Room, he would see the President and a change would come over him. Suddenly he was all smiles and the picture of affability.” The talks with Johnson would be very warm, and “underneath it all,” Harlow said, “the General loved it—at least initially.”