The Untold History of the United States

by Oliver Stone

  Chapter 8

  LBJ:

  Empire Derailed

  Castro was dining with French journalist Jean Daniel when he learned of Kennedy’s assassination. Three times he exclaimed, “This is bad news!” The previous day he had told Daniel that Kennedy might prove to be the United States’ greatest president. Now everything had changed. He predicted, “You watch and see. I know them, they will try to put the blame on us for this thing.” Learning that news reports were labeling Oswald a “pro-Castro Marxist” heightened his concerns. He asked Daniel what Johnson thought of the Bay of Pigs and “What authority does he exercise over the CIA?”1

  When Khrushchev heard the news, he broke down and cried. It was days before he could resume his duties. An embassy official told White House Press Secretary Pierre Salinger, “He just wandered around his office for several days, like he was in a daze.”2 He visited the U.S. Embassy to sign the condolence book and sent Deputy Soviet Premier Anastas Mikoyan to personally represent him at the funeral. Trembling badly, Mikoyan approached Jacqueline Kennedy on the receiving line. Deeply moved, she took his hands in hers. There are two accounts of what she said. She remembered saying, “Please tell Mr. Chairman President that I know he and my husband worked together for a peaceful world, and now he and you must carry on my husband’s work.” Dean Rusk reported hearing her say, “My husband’s dead. Now peace is up to you.”3 Jacqueline Kennedy wrote to Khrushchev that though he and her husband were “adversaries,” they “were allied in a determination that the world should not be blown up.”4

  Lyndon Johnson was worlds apart from his fallen predecessor in every imaginable way. He was born in Stonewall, Texas, in 1908; his parents were teachers. His father also served five terms in the Texas House of Representatives. After graduating from Southwest Texas State Teachers College, Lyndon worked his way up in Texas politics and won election to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1937 and the Senate in 1948. He thrived as Senate majority leader, where the “Johnson treatment” became the stuff of legends. Columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak noted that it “could last ten minutes or four hours . . . whenever Johnson might find a fellow Senator within his reach. Its tone could be supplication, accusation, cajolery, exuberance, scorn, tears, complaint, the hint of threat. . . . It ran the gamut of human emotions. . . . Interjections from the target were rare. Johnson anticipated them before they could be spoken.”5 He was egotistical, overbearing, insecure, and extremely coarse, taking pleasure in inviting associates into the bathroom so he could conduct conversations while sitting on the toilet. Not a deep foreign policy thinker, he was a dedicated anti-Communist. He liked to say, “If you let a bully come in your front yard, he’ll be on your porch the next day and the day after that he’ll rape your wife in your own bed.”6

  Lyndon Johnson taking the oath of office following Kennedy’s assassination on November 22, 1963. The new president was worlds apart from his fallen predecessor.

  Johnson wasted no time affirming that he was “not going to lose Vietnam.”7 Yet his real commitment was not to fighting faraway wars but to carrying out social reforms at home. “I do not want to be the President who built empires, or sought grandeur, or extended dominion. I want to be the President who educated young children . . . who helped to feed the hungry . . . who helped the poor to find their own way and who protected the right of every citizen to vote in every election.” Averell Harriman believed that if it hadn’t been for Vietnam, “he’d have been the greatest president ever.” Sadly, he never came close.8

  On his second day in office, Johnson assured his advisors of his resolve to aggressively defend U.S. interests in Vietnam. CIA Director John McCone immediately realized that Johnson was rejecting Kennedy’s “emphasis on social reforms [in Vietnam]; he has very little tolerance with our spending so much time being ‘do-gooders.’ ”9 Nor did Johnson support Kennedy’s plan to have the troops out of Vietnam by 1965. Yet he initially had no intention of sending in U.S. combat troops or bombing North Vietnam in an election year. But the unpopular, repressive, and corrupt U.S.-backed government continued to lose more ground to the National Liberation Front.

  Johnson gives Senator Richard Russell the infamous “treatment.” Egotistical, overbearing, insecure, and extremely coarse, Johnson was not a deep foreign policy thinker.

  Four days after Kennedy’s death, Johnson issued National Security Action Memorandum (NSAM) 273, signaling that the United States would be taking a more hands-on approach to Vietnam. Earlier drafts of NSAM 273 had clearly limited covert actions against the North to South Vietnamese forces. NSAM 273 left the door open to covert action by U.S. forces as well.10

  From the start, Johnson made the fatal mistake of believing fanciful assessments of how well the war was going instead of sober accounts of the faltering military and political campaigns. When CIA Director McCone tried to warn Johnson that conditions in South Vietnam were much worse than Johnson realized, Johnson slammed the door in his face. McCone was no longer welcome in the Oval Office and was reduced to communicating via written reports that the president might or might not read.11

  Johnson initially questioned the importance of persevering in Vietnam. He confronted McGeorge Bundy in May 1964, asking, “What in the hell is Vietnam worth to me?”12 Johnson himself had offered one answer in a 1954 newsletter, telling constituents that “Indochina is a rich prize” with its tin and manganese deposits.13 Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge had a more capacious view: “He who holds or has influence in Vietnam can affect the future of the Philippines and Formosa to the east, Thailand and Burma with their huge rice surpluses to the west, and Malaysia and Indonesia with their rubber, ore, and tin to the south. Vietnam thus does not exist in a geographical vacuum—from it large storehouses of wealth and population can be influenced and undermined.”14 Arthur Tunnell of the Saigon office of Investors Overseas Service predicted, “After the war, there is going to be a big future for American businessmen here.”15 Charles Murphy wrote in Fortune, “Acre for acre the region in which Vietnam currently forms the dramatic foreground is as rich as any land on the face of the earth.” Senator Gale McGee described Southeast Asia as “the last major resource area outside the control of any of the major powers on the globe.” He admitted that “the conditions of the Vietnamese people” were “secondary.”16

  Johnson also feared the political consequences of losing the war. He had a recurring nightmare about what would happened if he vacillated or lost:

  There would be Robert Kennedy . . . telling everyone that I had betrayed John Kennedy’s commitment to South Vietnam. . . . That I was a coward. An unmanly man. A man without a spine. . . . Every night when I fell asleep I would see myself tied to the ground in the middle of a long, open space. In the distance, I could hear the voices of thousands of people. They were all shouting and running toward me: “Coward! Traitor! Weakling!”17

  Johnson endorsed McNamara’s strategy of graduated pressure on the North. The Joint Chiefs bristled under the constraints.

  In August 1964, Johnson and McNamara used a fabricated incident in the Gulf of Tonkin as an excuse to escalate the war. McNamara and other administration officials testified that the alleged attacks on U.S. destroyers had been “deliberate and unprovoked.”18 The American press parroted that line.

  Johnson still ran as the peace candidate in 1964, thoroughly thrashing the even more hawkish Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, who threatened to use nuclear weapons in Vietnam. During the campaign, Johnson assured voters, “We are not about to send American boys nine or ten thousand miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves.” The public overwhelmingly agreed. In a January 1965 survey of eighty-three senators, only seven favored bombing the North or deploying combat troops to the South. Vice President Hubert Humphrey urged Johnson not to escalate the war. Johnson responded by freezing Humphrey out of subsequent policy-making sessions, excluding him from National Security Council meetings for a year despite the fact that the vice president was, by
law, a member of the NSC.19

  Following the election, Johnson began a steady process of escalation. In December 1964, UN Secretary-General U Thant alerted Dean Rusk to Hanoi’s willingness to begin secret negotiations. But the United States ignored his entreaty, prompting Thant to declare in late February:

  I am sure the great American people, if only they knew the true facts and background to the developments in South Viet-Nam, will agree with me that further bloodshed is unnecessary. And that the political and diplomatic methods of discussions and negotiations alone can create conditions which will enable the United States to withdraw gracefully from that part of the world. As you know, in times of war and of hostilities the first casualty is truth.20

  Johnson wasn’t interested in peaceful solutions. In March, he told George Ball that he would “get sick and leave town” before he listened to any more peace proposals from Thant and British Prime Minister Harold Wilson.21

  Meanwhile, the United States sharply expanded the “free-fire zones,” in which anything that moved was considered a legitimate target. The U.S. arsenal of acceptable weapons included napalm, cluster bombs, and white phosphorus, which burned from the skin straight through to the bone, causing horrific and painful deaths.

  That such tactics had failed to slow the NLF’s steady gains in the countryside was becoming more obvious by the day. Johnson, who had been resisting pressure to bomb the North, finally relented. But first the United States needed a pretext for escalation. It decided to manufacture one. The CIA did what it could to “prove” that North Vietnam was instigating the southern insurgency. Twenty-five-year CIA agent Ralph McGehee exposed the effort to mislead the public: “The agency took tons of Communist-made weapons out of its warehouses, loaded them on a Vietnamese coastal vessel, faked a firefight, and then called in Western reporters . . . to ‘prove’ North Vietnamese aid to the Viet Cong.”22 The State Department followed up with a white paper devoting seven pages to this phony “evidence.” On February 7, 1965, the NLF attacked a U.S. helicopter base at Pleiku, killing eight and wounding a hundred U.S. troops. From Saigon, Bundy told Johnson and his advisors that Hanoi had “thrown down the gauntlet.”23 But Bundy admitted to David Halberstam that Pleiku was really no different from other episodes. “Pleikus are like streetcars,” as he put it.24

  Johnson initiated a new, and more brutal, phase of the war. He began Rolling Thunder, an ongoing bombing campaign against the North.

  Despite the intensification of violence, U.S. prospects remained bleak. In early April, as McCone stepped down as head of the CIA, he told Johnson that the road he was heading down was one of pure folly: “We will find ourselves mired down in combat in the jungle in a military effort that we cannot win, and from which we will have extreme difficulty in extracting ourselves.”25

  But Johnson dismissed intelligence reports that didn’t conform to what he wanted to hear. He later commented, “Let me tell you about these intelligence guys. When I was growing up in Texas, we had a cow named Bessie. I’d get her in the stanchion, seat myself and squeeze out a pail of fresh milk. One day, I’d worked hard and gotten a full pail of milk, but I wasn’t paying attention and old Bessie swung her shit-smeared tail through that bucket of milk. Now, you know, that’s what these intelligence guys do. You work hard and get a good program or policy going, and they swing a shit-smeared tail through it.”26

  The Joint Chiefs continued to pressure Johnson for a very large troop commitment and an expanded bombing campaign. In April, Johnson sent another 40,000 troops, bringing the total to 75,000. He understood full well that once the United States committed to sending combat troops, the initial deployment would be just the tip of the iceberg. In June, he asked General Earle Wheeler, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, how many troops would be required to win. Wheeler replied, “If you intend to drive the last Vietcong out of Vietnam it will take seven hundred, eight hundred thousand, a million men and about seven years.”27

  McNamara began signaling Hanoi that the United States would even consider using nuclear weapons. An international uproar ensued, forcing McNamara to qualify his statements. Soviet UN Ambassador Nikolai Fedorenko wasn’t satisfied. As he put it:

  The American militarists do not preclude the possible use of nuclear weapons in South Viet-Nam. See the statement made today by Mr. McNamara . . . when he said that only in the present situation there is no military need for the use of nuclear weapons. This means that the United States means that situations may arise in Viet-Nam where provision has been made for resorting to these weapons of mass destruction. The United States has gone so far in its desire to stifle the National Liberation Movement that it is ready to threaten mankind with nuclear war.

  He reminded delegates to the U.N. Disarmament Commission that this would not be the first time the United States had resorted to such measures: “The United States is not adverse to utilizing . . . nuclear warheads against the people of an Asian country as they have done once before, covering themselves with indelible shame for centuries to come.”28 He also condemned U.S. use of chemical warfare against the Viet Cong, warning that future generations would “shudder on remembering” this “crime, an act of lawlessness, a most cruel violation of the laws of international policy and a trampling of elementary moral principles.”29

  Napalm and white phosphorus bombs being dropped over Vietnam. Under Johnson, the U.S. arsenal of acceptable weapons in Vietnam grew to include napalm, cluster bombs, and white phosphorous, which burned straight to the bone, causing horrific and painful deaths.

  In May 1965, a new government—the fifth since the overthrow of Diem a year and a half earlier—seized power, headed by Air Marshal Nguyen Cao Ky and General Nguyen Van Thieu. Assistant Secretary of State William Bundy later commented that the new regime “seemed to all of us the bottom of the barrel, absolutely the bottom of the barrel.” Ky’s commitment to democratic ideals was tenuous at best. He commented, “People ask me who my heroes are. I have only one: Hitler.” He displayed his understanding of democracy when commenting prior to the 1967 elections that if the person elected “is a Communist or if he is a Neutralist, I am going to fight him militarily. In any democratic country you have the right to disagree with the views of others.” But even Ky admitted to the New York Times’ James Reston in 1965 that the Communists were “closer to the people’s yearning for social justice and an independent life,” as Reston put it, than his own government was.30 Former military advisor John Paul Vann, who had returned to work on the pacification program, concurred:

  There is a revolution going on in this country—and the principles, goals, and desires of the other side are much closer to what Americans believe in than those of GVN. . . . I am convinced that, even though the NLF is Communist-dominated, . . . the great majority of the people supporting it are doing so because it is their only hope to change and improve their living conditions and opportunities. If I were a lad of eighteen faced with the same choice—whether to support the GVN or the NLF—and a member of a rural community, I would surely choose the NLF.31

  Faced with a crumbling political situation, Johnson and his advisors again decided to increase the number of troops. Meeting on July 22, they estimated long-term troop requirements at between 500,000 and 600,000, assuming the Chinese did not become involved. If the Chinese entered the conflict, an additional 300,000 would be required. In the short run, they agreed, 100,000 would be needed by the end of the year and another 100,000 in January 1966 just to halt the slide and prevent defeat. They were relieved that the president would finally have to level with the American people about the country’s commitment to a major war. Johnson addressed the nation on July 28. He announced an immediate troop increase of 50,000, raising the total in the country to 125,000. Because an unspecified number of additional forces would be needed later, he was raising the monthly draft call from 17,000 to 35,000 per month, but he had decided against calling up the reserves.

  General Nguyen Van Thieu with Johnson (background) and Air Ma
rshall Nguyen Cao Ky with McNamara (foreground). Ky and Thieu headed the South Vietnamese government that seized power in May 1965. William Bundy later commented that the new regime “seemed to all of us the bottom of the barrel, absolutely the bottom of the barrel.”

  Congress applauded Johnson’s restraint, taking comfort in the moderate troop commitment. At the Pentagon, however, both civilians and military advisors were shocked by Johnson’s decision to deliberately mislead the American people about the reality of the situation in Vietnam and the commitment the United States was making to a major war destined to last for years. Joint Chiefs Chairman Wheeler later explained, “We felt that it would be desirable to have a reserve call-up in order to make sure that the people of the U.S. knew that we were in a war and not engaged at some two-penny military adventure.”32