For example, it could be argued that military victory was still possible if I would remove the restrictions Johnson had placed on our commanders in the field and allow them to use our massive power to defeat the enemy. The most serious of these constraints was the bombing halt; because of it the Communists had been able to regroup their forces and amass supplies for a new offensive. Those who favored the escalation option argued that just the threat of an invasion of North Vietnam would tie down North Vietnamese troops along the DMZ; that mining Haiphong Harbor would cripple the enemy’s supply lines; and that free pursuit of the Communist forces into Laos and Cambodia would blunt their ability to continue making hit-and-run attacks against our forces in South Vietnam. Renewed bombing would reinforce these other moves. That, in essence, was the escalation option. It was an option we ruled out very early.
The opinion polls showed a significant percentage of the public favored a military victory in Vietnam. But most people thought of a “military victory” in terms of gearing up to administer a knockout blow that would both end the war and win it. The problem was that there were only two such knockout blows available to me. One would have been to bomb the elaborate systems of irrigation dikes in North Vietnam. The resulting floods would have killed hundreds of thousands of civilians. The other possible knockout blow would have involved the use of tactical nuclear weapons. Short of one of these methods, escalation would probably have required up to six months of highly intensified fighting and significantly increased casualties before the Communists would finally be forced to give up and accept a peace settlement. The domestic and international uproar that would have accompanied the use of either of these knockout blows would have got my administration off to the worst possible start. And as far as escalating the conventional fighting was concerned, there was no way that I could hold the country together for that period of time in view of the numbers of casualties we would be sustaining. Resorting to the escalation option would also delay or even destroy any chance we might have to develop a new relationship with the Soviet Union and Communist China.
At the other end of the spectrum from escalation was the case for ending the war simply by announcing a quick and orderly withdrawal of all American forces. If that were done, the argument went, the Communists would probably respond by returning our POWs after the last American had departed.
There were some undeniably compelling political arguments to recommend this particular course. As one of my friends in Congress put it, “You didn’t get us into this war, so even if you end it with a bad peace, by doing it quickly you can put the blame on Kennedy and Johnson and the Democrats. Just go on TV and remind people that it was Kennedy who sent the 16,000 Americans in there, and that it was Johnson who escalated it to 540,000. Then announce that you’re bringing them all home, and you’ll be a hero.”
As I saw it, however, this option had long since been foreclosed. A precipitate withdrawal would abandon 17 million South Vietnamese, many of whom had worked for us and supported us, to Communist atrocities and domination. When the Communists had taken over North Vietnam in 1954, 50,000 people had been murdered, and hundreds of thousands more died in labor camps. In 1968, during their brief control of Hué, they had shot or clubbed to death or buried alive more than 3,000 civilians whose only crime was to have supported the Saigon government. We simply could not sacrifice an ally in such a way. If we suddenly reneged on our earlier pledges of support, because they had become difficult or costly to carry out, or because they had become unpopular at home, we would not be worthy of the trust of other nations and we certainly would not receive it.
As far as I was concerned, almost everything involving a Vietnam settlement was negotiable except two things: I would not agree to anything that did not include the return of all our POWs and an accounting for our missing in action; and I would not agree to any terms that required or amounted to our overthrow of President Thieu.
I was aware that many Americans considered Thieu a petty and corrupt dictator unworthy of our support. I was not personally attached to Thieu, but I looked at the situation in practical terms. As I saw it, the alternative to Thieu was not someone more enlightened or tolerant or democratic but someone weaker who would not be able to hold together the contentious factions in South Vietnam. The South Vietnamese needed a strong and stable government to carry on the fight against the efforts of the Vietcong terrorists, who were supported by the North Vietnamese Army in their efforts to impose a Communist dictatorship on the 17 million people of South Vietnam. My determination to honor our commitment to Thieu was a commitment to stability, and that is exactly why the Communists were so insistent upon securing his downfall as part of a settlement. For three and a half years, until the fall of 1972, the North Vietnamese insisted upon our willingness to overthrow or sacrifice Thieu as a sine qua non for a settlement. Once they dropped this demand serious negotiations began.
I began my presidency with three fundamental premises regarding Vietnam. First, I would have to prepare public opinion for the fact that total military victory was no longer possible. Second, I would have to act on what my conscience, my experience, and my analysis told me was true about the need to keep our commitment. To abandon South Vietnam to the Communists now would cost us inestimably in our search for a stable, structured, and lasting peace. Third, I would have to end the war as quickly as was honorably possible.
Since I had ruled out a quick military victory, the only possible course was to try for a fair negotiated settlement that would preserve the independence of South Vietnam. Ideally the war could be over in a matter of months if the North Vietnamese truly wanted peace. Realistically, however, I was prepared to take most of my first year in office to arrive at a negotiated agreement.
In mid-December I told Kissinger that I wanted to send a message to North Vietnam. We decided to use Jean Sainteny as an intermediary. Sainteny was a French businessman who had spent many years in Indochina and who still knew personally many of the leaders in both North and South Vietnam, including Ho Chi Minh. I had first met Sainteny in the South of France in 1965, and Kissinger knew him as well.
My first message, which Sainteny gave to the North Vietnamese in Paris, set forth in conciliatory terms our proposals for a negotiated settlement. Eleven days later we received a reply charging that Saigon was holding up the opening of the Paris peace talks and that we supported the “absurd demands” of the South Vietnamese leaders. “If the U.S. wishes,” their note concluded, “it may communicate its general ideas, and its specific ideas for making more precise points than are already known, for our serious examination.” When he handed this reply to Sainteny, Mai Van Bo, Hanoi’s representative in Paris, commented, “At the beginning, I believe that the question is to know if the U.S. wants peace, if it really wishes to withdraw its troops from South Vietnam, or if it only talks of this to make it possible to do nothing.”
I waited only two days to reply, sending word through Sainteny that “the Nixon administration is willing to negotiate seriously and in good faith.” The North Vietnamese reply to this message still took a hard line, but I was neither surprised nor discouraged; I had never expected to end the long war quickly or easily. In my inaugural address I reiterated my desire to reach a peaceful settlement if possible, but I left no doubts about my determination to see through to an honorable conclusion the commitment we had undertaken. I said: “To all those who would be tempted by weakness, let us leave no doubt that we will be as strong as we need to be for as long as we need to be.”
The Vietnam war was complicated by factors that had never occurred before in America’s conduct of a war. Many of the most prominent liberals of both parties in Congress, having supported our involvement in Vietnam under Kennedy and Johnson, were now trying to back off from their commitment. Senators and congressmen, Cabinet members and columnists who had formerly supported the war were now swelling the ranks of the antiwar forces. In 1969 I still had a congressional majority on war-related votes and questions, but it
was a bare one at best, and I could not be sure how long it would hold. Another unusual aspect of this war was that the American news media had come to dominate domestic opinion about its purpose and conduct and also about the nature of the enemy. The North Vietnamese were a particularly ruthless and cruel enemy, but the American media concentrated primarily on the failings and frailties of the South Vietnamese or of our own forces. In each night’s TV news and in each morning’s paper the war was reported battle by battle, but little or no sense of the underlying purpose of the fighting was conveyed. Eventually this contributed to the impression that we were fighting in military and moral quicksand, rather than toward an important and worthwhile objective.
More than ever before, television showed the terrible human suffering and sacrifice of war. Whatever the intention behind such relentless and literal reporting of the war, the result was a serious demoralization of the home front, raising the question whether America would ever again be able to fight an enemy abroad with unity and strength of purpose at home. As Newsweek columnist Kenneth Crawford wrote, this was the first war in our history when the media was more friendly to our enemies than to our allies. I felt that by the time I had become President the way the Vietnam war had been conducted and reported had worn down America’s spirit and sense of confidence.
As I prepared to enter the presidency, I regarded the antiwar protesters and demonstrators with alternating feelings of appreciation for their concerns, anger at their excesses, and, primarily, frustration at their apparent unwillingness to credit me even with a genuine desire for peace. But whatever my estimation of the demonstrators’ motives—and whatever their estimate of mine—I considered that the practical effect of their activity was to give encouragement to the enemy and thus prolong the war. They wanted to end the war in Vietnam. So did I. But they wanted to end it immediately, and in order to do so they were prepared to abandon South Vietnam. That was something I would not permit.
The final returns of the 1968 presidential election showed that I had defeated Humphrey by only 500,000 votes—43.3 percent to 42.6 percent. But George Wallace had received 13.5 percent, nearly 10 million votes. My votes and Wallace’s totaled 56.8 percent, and together they represented a clear mandate: after almost four decades in which the federal government had insatiably drawn power to itself, the American voters wanted a change of direction away from Washington paternalism. As I considered the situation that could confront me when I assumed responsibility as head of government, the major question as I saw it was: given an opposition Congress and an essentially liberal bureaucracy, how far would I be able to go toward carrying out this mandate?
I was the first newly elected President since Zachary Taylor 120 years earlier to take office with both houses of Congress controlled by the opposition party. If I were to get legislation passed, I would need a coalition of bipartisan support.
Throughout my presidency my strongest and most dependable support in foreign affairs came from conservatives in both parties. I came to depend particularly on a group of Southern Democrats including Sonny Montgomery of Mississippi, George Mahon of Texas, William Colmer of Mississippi, and Joe Waggonner, Eddie Hébert, and Otto Passman of Louisiana in the House, and Dick Russell of Georgia, John Stennis of Mississippi, and John McClellan of Arkansas in the Senate.
Unfortunately, there was no similar coalition I could tap for support on domestic policy. In that area I knew that the different interests of different groups would coincide on some issues and diverge on others. Liberals would seldom think that I had gone far enough, and conservatives would often think I had gone too far. On every issue I would have to gather enough borderline members of each persuasion to pass my legislation. To get my programs through Congress I would have to devise complex political strategies. To prevent things I opposed from being enacted I would have to be prepared to bear the political and public relations consequences of vetoing large amounts of legislation.
I won the 1968 election as a Washington insider, but with an outsider’s prejudices. The behind-the-scenes power structure in Washington is often called the “iron triangle”: a three-sided set of relationships composed of congressional lobbyists, congressional committee and subcommittee members and their staffs, and the bureaucrats in the various federal departments and agencies. These people tend to work with each other year after year regardless of changes in administrations; they form personal and professional associations and generally act in concert.
I felt that one of the reasons I had been elected was my promise to break the hammerlock Washington holds over the money and decisions that affect American lives. I wanted to break open the iron triangle and start turning money and power back to the states and cities, and I wanted to throw the red tape out the window. But Washington is a city run primarily by Democrats and liberals, dominated by like-minded newspapers and other media, convinced of its superiority to other cities and other points of view; from the beginning I knew my chances of succeeding with the kinds of domestic reforms I had in mind were slim.
I urged the new Cabinet members to move quickly to replace holdover bureaucrats with people who believed in what we were trying to do. I warned that if they did not act quickly, they would become captives of the bureaucracy they were trying to change. “In effect, we want to reverse the whole trend of government over the last eight years. We may only have four years in which to do it, so we can’t waste a minute,” I said. I urged them to resist the Washington habit of recruiting their staffs solely from Eastern schools and companies and instead to branch out and get new blood from the South, the West, and the Midwest. “We can’t depend on people who believe in another philosophy of government to give us their undivided loyalty or their best work,” I concluded. “For some reason this is something that the supposedly idealistic Democrats have always been better at recognizing than the supposedly hard-nosed Republicans. If we don’t get rid of those people, they will either sabotage us from within, or they’ll just sit back on their well-paid asses and wait for the next election to bring back their old bosses.”
As I saw it, America in the 1960s had undergone a misguided crash program aimed at using the power of the presidency and the federal government to right past wrongs by trying to legislate social progress. This was the idea behind Kennedy’s New Frontier and Johnson’s Great Society. The problems were real and the intention worthy, but the method was foredoomed. By the end of the decade its costs had become almost prohibitively high in terms of the way it had undermined fundamental relationships within our federal system, created confusion about our national values, and corroded American belief in ourselves as a people and as a nation.
The 1960s had been a decade of great restlessness and change. Prodded by the emotional power of Kennedy’s liberal rhetoric, new sensitivities—some sincere, some merely fashionable—developed regarding the black, the poor, and the young in our society.
This was the period of what social critic Henry Fairlie has called “the politics of expectation,” when the President held out the promise of solutions by means of federal programs to the problems of poverty and racial discrimination, thereby raising the expectations of millions of people—and, of course, securing the support of millions of voters. From 1960 to 1969 the cost of welfare benefits for families with dependent children nearly tripled. More than a quarter of a trillion federal dollars was spent between 1964 and 1969 in an attempt to eradicate poverty and inequality. But instead of solving problems, these programs themselves became part of the problem, by raising hopes they proved unable to fulfill.
Billions of dollars were poured into new federally sponsored programs and agencies to help the poor, but the poor frequently did not see much of this money because it went to pay the salaries of the social workers and the overhead of the vast new poverty bureaucracy, much of it composed of middle-class whites, that administered the programs and agencies. Housing and education services were tied up in red tape and foundered on the fundamentally mistaken notion that the poor can be ta
lked or taught out of their poverty.
In 1961 John Kennedy had challenged people to “ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.” By the end of the decade, however, many people were asking why the federal government had not done all the things it had promised and undertaken to do for them.
Perhaps most demoralizing of all, the working poor watched while the nonworking poor made as much money—and in some cases even more money—by collecting welfare payments and other unemployment benefits. This began a bitter cycle of frustration, anger, and hostility.
I wanted to be an activist President in domestic policy, but I wanted to be certain that the things we did had a chance of working. “Don’t promise more than we can do,” I told the Cabinet. “But do more than we can promise.”
I had watched the sixties from outside the arena of leadership, but I had strong feelings about what I had seen happen. I saw the mass demonstrations grow remote from the wellsprings of sensitivity and feeling that had originally prompted them, and become a cultural fad. And the new sensitivity to social inequities that was awakened at the beginning of the decade had, by the middle of the sixties, spawned an intolerance for the rights and opinions of those who disagreed with the vocal minority. I had no patience with the mindless rioters and professional malcontents, and I was appalled by the response of most of the nation’s political and academic leaders to them. The political leadership seemed unable to make the distinction between a wrong that needed to be set right and the use of such a wrong as a justification for violating the privileges of democracy. The young demonstrators held firmly to their beliefs, while the adults seemed stricken with ambivalence about their own guilt and doubts about their own values. By proving themselves vulnerable to mob rule, the political and academic leaders encouraged its spread. Contemptuous of most of their professors, encouraged by others on the faculty and in the political arena, and spotlighted by the rapt gaze of television cameras, the demonstrators and their demonstrations continued and grew, and so did the often rationalized or romanticized violence connected with them.
RN Page 48