Ambassador Nolting evidently was on to Johnson’s maneuvering since they had argued over it in Saigon; the ambassador cabled the State Department, attempting to disrupt Johnson and Diem’s two-letter scheme. He had been there when Johnson specifically directed Diem to send the second letter before his own return. When Diem tried to have his secretary of state, Thuan, personally take the letter to Washington, Nolting suggested that this be done in mid-June, knowing that Johnson would be returning to Washington on May 24. Nolting had already explained to Chester Bowles what happened during Johnson’s visit, and he, in turn, tipped off the White House about the wish list that Thuan would be bringing with him. This ensured that he would receive a cold reception.129
Kennedy’s use of Johnson on this trip—deliberately entrapping him if he tried to usurp more authority than he had—suggests that he was finally catching on to the agenda shared by a number of his subordinates within the White House and Pentagon. Johnson’s recommendation, which he gave to the press, was that the president should not “get bogged down in a land war in Southeast Asia.”130 This was in direct conflict with everything he had said to Diem, and everyone else on the trip, but the president’s maneuvers on NSAM 52 had put Johnson into a dilemma between what he really wanted to say, what Kennedy had already done to limit his options, what he knew the Joint Chiefs wanted him to do, and what he wanted Diem to request. Diem, anticipating the quandary, had been stalling for time. Johnson also had to consider the reactions of his least favorite group of people, those at the State Department. In the end, he chose to report only the fact that Diem had initially agreed that he would not request combat troops. Johnson neglected to mention that he himself had held out the possibility of adding them under the pretext of using them for training Diem’s army.131
In the meantime, Johnson had already been lobbied by certain of his old Senate colleagues who were among the most ardent interventionists. Senator Thomas Dodd (the father of the beleaguered Senator Chris Dodd), before he lost his own credibility, had sent Johnson a cable bemoaning how American credibility “was at an all time low in Asia because of the Bay of Pigs fiasco in Cuba.”132 Johnson had elicited this congressional “support” for his own position, not the president’s, so of course he was very disappointed that his influence had come to naught. Johnson’s report back to Kennedy would be a rebuke of Kennedy’s own policies, including what Johnson felt was Kennedy’s unfortunate decision to neutralize Laos instead of creating a war there:
Our [Johnson’s] mission arrested the decline of confidence in the United States. It did not—in my judgment—restore any confidence already lost … If these men were bankers, I would know—without bothering to ask—that there would be no further extensions on my note.133
Johnson’s condescending message to Kennedy was essentially telling him that he, the president, was responsible for the continuing collapse of Southeast Asia and that their leaders would not tolerate more of his mistakes; there is no record of how Kennedy reacted to Johnson’s impertinence and brazen insubordination. Furthermore, Johnson was implicitly admitting the unsuccessful nature of his own mission to restore the confidence in America, which was tantamount to putting the blame for his own failure back upon Kennedy. His report continued, “The battle against Communism must be joined in Southeast Asia with strength and determination to achieve success there—or the United States, inevitably, must surrender the Pacific and take up our defenses on our own shores”134 (as if there had been an impending threat of a U.S. invasion by the Viet Minh). Johnson cleverly avoided the question of additional troops by framing the issue as a choice between U.S. support or complete disengagement: We must decide if we are going to help these countries, or “throw in the towel and pull back our defenses to San Francisco and a ‘Fortress of America’ concept.” Johnson recommended a “clear-cut and strong program of action.”135 The requests on Diem’s wish list—cobbled together as requested by Johnson—greatly exceeded anything that Kennedy had expected, especially the request for a hundred-thousand-man increase and $175 million to pay for it. All of the requests were tied to the threat from Laos, and some of the language in Diem’s letter bore a striking resemblance to Lansdale’s report and General McGarr’s expanded version of it. Diem’s second letter—written at Lyndon Johnson’s specific request—further damaged the already-poor relationship between the president and vice president.
Johnson had gone to Saigon drunk and in one of his famous funks and had evidently remained in an undiplomatic state for most of the time he spent there; he caved on gaining any ground on the negotiating points he was supposed to have restated; he made wild promises to Diem and the national assembly; he foolishly ventured into the issue of combat troops, which he had no business discussing and no authority to change; and finally, when he ran out of provocations and prevarications, he came home disappointed and frustrated.136 The vice president went before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on May 25, saying he was very “depressed” about Laos and that nothing would come out of the conference in Geneva. The incredible Senator Dodd lamented that the failure to act decisively now may be the “death knell” for the United States and all of Western civilization.137
Lyndon Johnson had sided with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the CIA, the despotic President Diem, and many of Kennedy’s military advisers and cabinet officials against his actual boss, his own president; all of the others whom Johnson was trying to appease were beating their war drums as loudly as they could while Kennedy struggled to get it all under his own control. The pressures were all around Kennedy in the fall of 1961 to send in troops because of the growing number of attacks from the Vietcong. In one month, September 1961, the number of guerrilla attacks in South Vietnam almost tripled from the previous months’ totals. The provincial capital of Phuoc Thanh was seized and Diem’s appointed chief was beheaded. On November 8, Defense Secretary McNamara, his deputy Roswell Gilpatric, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff all recommended to Kennedy in a memorandum that we “commit the U.S. to the clear objective of preventing the fall of South Vietnam to Communism and that we support this commitment by the necessary military actions [an initial 8,000 men, followed by six division of ground forces, or ‘about 205,000 men’].”138 It soon became apparent to Kennedy that Johnson’s performance on his special Vietnam mission had cost him greatly, despite the steps Kennedy had taken to pull the rug out from under him as soon as he had left the country. Still, Johnson had given up the administration’s long-held positions on a number of issues and had greatly exceeded his authority in the discussions of possible troop deployments, as well as by not setting forth the obligations of Diem’s government with any of these issues.139 Johnson himself was also very frustrated that he had not successfully brought the country squarely into an Indochina war, but he still harbored his own White House aspirations, and he knew that he would handle this war his own way once he was president.
After his rather appalling performance in this episode, he contented himself, like Lansdale, to watch events unfold from the sidelines until he could assume the role of commander in chief. For over two years afterward, Johnson would not be involved in any discussions on Vietnam.140 This would clearly be at Kennedy’s directive, subtly done through a process of omission, by simply not inviting him to strategic meetings on the subject. Johnson’s assigned military representative, Howard Burris, said this about Johnson’s view of intervention in Vietnam: “I don’t think he had a really deep perception and comprehension of what the whole scene was about.”141 According to author John M. Newman, Johnson’s views “were rooted in the superficial politics of Washington, not in the underlying realities of the situation in Vietnam.”142
In other words, Lyndon Johnson was motivated out of a desire to please the military chiefs and the officials in the CIA organization for his own long-term purposes, which he had been developing since at least July 1960. That he had no scintilla of interest in serving the president, as a loyal, effective, and obedient vice president helping JFK pull the b
ureaucracy in the direction to which he wanted to take it, was evident in all of his actions throughout the period of 1961 to 1963. During his entire tenure as vice president, Lyndon B. Johnson was marching to his own drums, not the president’s. Rather than Lyndon Johnson playing a subservient and supportive role under the president, he had come to believe that Kennedy was an inept greenhorn who needed the guidance of an experienced and brilliant man like himself. His attitude from the very start was that only he, Lyndon B. Johnson, was equipped to handle the great responsibilities of the presidency.
The Time Bomb of Vietnam
A cursory review of the history of this ancient civilization, which had the misfortune of being thrust into the crosshairs of the political arena of the United States circa 1950–1975, is essential to a full understanding of how Lyndon Johnson became the thirty-sixth president and why he could not be reelected to that position to a second term. Vietnam had fought off many invaders and colonists for most of its long history. It had been under Chinese control for a thousand years before becoming a nation-state for another thousand years. During this period, a number of successive dynasties had ruled over it until it became a colony of France in the nineteenth century. In 1941, a Communist and nationalist liberation movement called the Viet Minh, after its leader Ho Chi Minh, was formed to resist the Japanese invasion and to assert the country’s independence from any further colonization. After World War II, the Viet Minh launched a rebellion against the colonial authority governing the colonies of French Indochina (which also included Laos and Cambodia). This led to the defeat of the French in 1954, the Vietnamese having finally thrown off the colonial yoke completely; they had not overcome all of their internal differences, however, so peace was illusory. Ho Chi Minh was more of a Vietnamese nationalist than a Communist, at least in the context of the “international Communist movement” that had captured world headlines in that era. His intent was simply to establish a unified and independent Vietnam in a land that, unfortunately for its inhabitants, would become ground zero in the clash between the international forces of capitalism versus Communism.
Throughout 1961 Kennedy was pressed by some members of his own administration to commit troops to Laos and Vietnam; in addition to Johnson, others who advocated greater support for Diem included Robert McNamara, Dean Rusk, McGeorge Bundy, Walt Rostow, and Roswell Gilpatric. All of these men had impressive credentials coming into the administration, but their ability to think independently and argue against the “groupthink” then dominating the cabinet was impeded by their lack of knowledge about the risks they espoused. Years later, Clark Clifford finally admitted that he privately held strong reservations about Johnson’s policies but did not forcefully assert them because he felt he did not understand the issues as much as his colleagues, who apparently did not know anything more than he did but were less introspective about how much they really knew. Clifford offered the following as a rationale for acceding to Johnson and the other saber-rattlers who were aching for a war:
I had never considered myself to be an expert on the situation in Vietnam. Many of those who had opposed Ball and me had greater experience and familiarity with the problem, and presented their views with certainty and conviction. Everyone else represented a department or agency of the government, with his own channels of information from the field. My opposition to the buildup had been based to a considerable extent on intuition; I had no firsthand knowledge or sources of information from Southeast Asia to place against the confidence and detailed knowledge of the supporters of the war … When I later took a firsthand look at the situation, I discovered that much of the information from the embassy and the military command in Saigon was either inaccurate or irrelevant. I should have acted earlier on the warning signs, but I did not begin to realize how inaccurate these official reports were until my trip to Southeast Asia in the late summer of 1967. Until then, I was so anxious to find a way out of Vietnam that I accepted them as accurate, and I supported the military requests for more troops as the best way to end the war quickly.143 (emphasis added)
Clifford’s quasi mea culpa merely begs the further question: How many of the others arguing for committing more American troops, or merely defending the previous actions, in Vietnam privately held the same thoughts during the years of the buildup but were afraid to express them? There are numerous accounts of the fact that Johnson only wanted yes-men around him and how he only wanted to hear good news, and as many stories of how anyone who might have a contrary view would risk being fired. His unctuous secretary of state, Dean Rusk, acknowledged that cabinet members did not disagree openly with him: “At most cabinet meetings Lyndon Johnson asked Bob McNamara and me to comment on Vietnam, and then he would go around the table, asking each cabinet officer, ‘Do you have any questions or comments?’ Everyone sat silently.”144 Given the obviously uncomfortable position that would put anyone in—at least anyone who had even the slightest streak of integrity left in them—it is troubling that more of his aides and cabinet-level officials did not resign. Eventually, Jack Valenti, McGeorge Bundy, Bill Moyers, and George Ball did leave during 1966, and Robert McNamara a year later (though it’s still unclear whether he resigned or was fired), as the American involvement in Vietnam continued escalating; even after they left, he disparaged them, yet they did not notably fight back.145
It may be that some of their attitudes—certainly Johnson’s was—were inseparable from their simultaneous efforts, on another track, to push for a military buildup as a means to ensure the financial rewards for the military-industrial complex that Eisenhower had just warned the nation about. The Government Accounting Office found that his friends at Brown & Root “were overcharging by hundreds of millions of dollars beyond what was legitimate for their construction work in Vietnam.”146 As we will see shortly, Johnson’s personal investment in Bell Aerospace and General Dynamics might have influenced how the TFX contract for a new-generation fighter plane had been awarded to his favored company. McNamara and Gilpatric were also highly immersed in the political fight to wrest the contract away from Boeing, of Seattle, Washington, in order to pay back political favors to a Texas company that had been floundering until then. A concurrent military escalation at that time would increase the payback dividend of making a new-generation warplane by greatly increasing the number produced. The question of whether political payoffs—significant financial gains for select corporations and individuals—were a major influence in the foreign policy decisions being presented to Kennedy is a disturbing and ironic denouement to his legacy.
In 1962, Johnson’s successor as Senate majority leader, Mike Mansfield—a longtime supporter of Diem, to the point of being known popularly in South Vietnam as “Diem’s godfather”—reversed his position on the growing U.S. commitment to the support of Diem’s government. This reversal caused JFK to ask him to visit Vietnam and give him an independent report on the situation; it was submitted to Kennedy on December 18, 1962, and did not make pleasant reading for the president. The report stated that outside its cities, South Vietnam was “run at least at night by the Vietcong. The government in Saigon is still seeking acceptance by the ordinary people in large areas of the countryside. Out of fear or indifference or hostility the peasants still withhold acquiescence, let alone approval of that government.”147 While Mansfield still supported Diem, he did not have confidence in the government, dominated by Diem’s brother Ngo Dinh Nhu, to ever gain popular support. Mansfield warned Kennedy against further escalation of military commitments, saying that to do so would ultimately require “a truly massive commitment of American military personnel and other resources—in short going to war fully ourselves against the guerrillas—and the establishment of some form of neocolonial rule in South Vietnam.”148 In other words, Mansfield warned Kennedy against any additional military support because he knew that it would inexorably lead to greater and greater involvement of the U.S. military and ultimately into the same “unenviable position in Vietnam which was formerly occupied by th
e French.”149
Stunned into realizing the truth of Mansfield’s observations—which aligned with those of his friend Edmund Gullion and adviser John Kenneth Galbraith—by early 1963, he had resolved anew to himself that he would reverse course and begin a withdrawal of the military presence in Vietnam.150 Kennedy told Mike Mansfield in May 1963 that he now agreed with his thinking “on the need for a complete military withdrawal from Vietnam” but he couldn’t do it until after being reelected.151 After the meeting with Mansfield, Kennedy told Kenneth O’Donnell that “he had made up his mind that after his reelection he would take the risk of unpopularity and make a complete withdrawal of American forces from Vietnam. ‘In 1965 I’ll be damned everywhere as a Communist appeaser. But I don’t care. If I tried to pull out completely now, we would have another Joe McCarthy red scare on our hands, but I can do it after I’m reelected. So we had better make damned sure that I am reelected.’”152
During the spring and summer of 1963, conditions in Vietnam continued to deteriorate, precipitated by the government’s sudden enforcement of an obsolete law against the public display of religious flags just days before the annual festival honoring Buddha’s birthday. The Buddhists flew their flags anyway and defied the order to disperse given to them by the Catholic deputy province chief, who then ordered his troops to fire on the crowd. The ensuing riot left seven dead, including two children crushed by armored vehicles, and fifteen injured. The Diem government lied about the cause, saying a Vietcong agent had thrown a hand grenade into the crowd and that the victims had been crushed in a stampede. The CIA then also lied about the cause, saying that “the weight of evidence [indicates] that government cannon-fire caused the deaths in Hue.”153 This finding ignored the fact that “neither the Saigon government nor the Viet Cong possessed the kind of powerful plastic explosives that decapitated the victims at Hue on May 8. It was only the CIA that had such an explosive, as admitted later by Captain Scott, the U.S. military adviser responsible for the bombing … [which was a pattern started eleven years before with] the Agency’s use of plastic bombs in Saigon in 1952 to scapegoat the Viet Minh as terrorists … Both Kennedy and Diem had been outmaneuvered by the CIA.”154
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