1968

by Mark Kurlansky

  If the speech was a barometer for the direction the country was turning, the news was not good for liberalism. The Great Society, Johnson’s catchphrase for the extensive list of social programs that were supposed to define his presidency, was mentioned only once. The audience of Congress, cabinet members, and top-ranking military greeted the speech with the appropriate periodic applause that always seasons these events. According to Time magazine, the president was interrupted by applause fifty-three times, although it reported no genuine enthusiasm to most of these outbursts. The one prolonged standing ovation came when Johnson said, “The American people have had enough of rising crime and lawlessness in this country.”

  In place of new social programs, Johnson announced the Safe Streets Act, a new narcotics law with more severe penalties for the sale of what had become a campus favorite, LSD. He also called for gun control legislation to stop “mail order murder,” which was the only statement in the fifty-minute speech that received applause from Senator Robert Kennedy.

  Johnson responded to Hanoi’s offer of talks—on condition that the United States cease bombing and other hostile acts—by saying, “The bombing would stop immediately if talks would take place promptly and with reasonable hopes that they would be productive.” He then angrily recalled the enemy’s violation of the New Year’s truce, adding, “And the other side must not take advantage of our restraint as they have done in the past.” This was an important point, since there were calls for another cease-fire for the upcoming Vietnamese New Year, Tet.

  A Gallup poll released two days after the speech showed more people seeing Johnson as hawkish than saw either Nixon or Reagan that way. In a time when politicians were divided more commonly into doves and hawks, for peace or for war, than into Democrats and Republicans, this was significant. Both Nixon and Reagan had been regarded as unelectable, and one of the reasons had been their hawkishness.

  In a New York Times Magazine article titled “Why the Gap Between LBJ and the Nation?” Max Frankel suggested that Johnson’s problem was not so much that he handled the media badly, but that he was just not convincing:

  But the measure of Mr. Johnson’s trouble is not only Vietnam—perhaps not even Vietnam. It is his failure to persuade much of the country of his own deep belief that his war policy is right. Were he to succeed, his critics, even in the opposition, might at least respect the genuineness of his purpose. As it is, a great many of them seem to have concluded that he is beyond rational debate, merely afraid to concede a “mistake” or too timid to risk retreat. . . . He rehearses many of his public performances and studies some afterward. He has tried every combination of television lighting known to theatrical science and uttered every genre of political address.

  Frankel quoted the president comparing himself to the Boston Red Sox’s spectacular slugger Ted Williams. Despite all his records and considerable accomplishments, when Ted Williams stepped up to the plate fans often booed. “They’ll say about me,” Johnson explained, “I knock the ball over the fence—but they don’t like the way he stands at the plate.” The Times ran a follow-up letter to the editor signed by five members of the history department at Cornell:

  On the other hand, there are similarities between the men that the President evidently chose to overlook: (1) Boston fans booed Williams not because of his stance but because he seldom delivered in the clutch; (2) Williams’s problems were often caused by rudeness, immaturity and unsportsmanlike conduct with the public and the press; (3) Williams could never make a hit in left field either; (4) when faced with a new obstacle, like the Boudreau shift, Williams never chose to outsmart it but insisted on escalation to right field.

  The day after the address, Martin Luther King, the most reluctant to denounce the war of all the civil rights leaders, called for a massive march on Washington in early February to protest “one of history’s most cruel and senseless wars.”

  “We need to make clear in this political year, to congressmen on both sides of the aisle and to the president of the United States, that we will no longer tolerate, we will no longer vote for men who continue to see the killings of Vietnamese and Americans as the best way of advancing the goals of freedom and self-determination in Southeast Asia.”

  Traditionally the first day of Congress is a perfunctory one, but the start of the second session of the Ninetieth Congress in mid-January was marked by five thousand women, many dressed in black, marching and singing in protest over the war in Vietnam. They were led by eighty-seven-year-old Jeanette Rankin, the first woman member of Congress.

  On January 21 a concert called “Broadway for Peace 1968,” billed as “the greatest array of stars ever,” was to have one performance at New York’s Philharmonic Hall. Among those contributing their time to the event were Harry Belafonte, Leonard Bernstein, Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Eli Wallach, Carl Reiner, Robert Ryan, Barbra Streisand, and one of the biggest television stars of the year, Tommy Smothers. The proceeds went to the campaigns of antiwar senatorial and congressional candidates, many of whom were on hand to meet their supporters after the program.

  Even Wall Street was turning against the war. The brokerage house Paine Webber, Jackson, and Curtis was running full-page newspaper ads explaining why peace was in the interest of investors and “the most bullish thing that could happen to the stock market.”

  Four days after the State of the Union address, Robert Kennedy attended the annual black-tie dinner of the Rochester, New York, Chamber of Commerce and asked for a show of hands for or against pursuing the war. About seven hundred were opposed. Only about thirty to forty hands indicated approval of war policy.

  Yet Johnson was still considered the front-runner for the election in November. The January Gallup poll showed 48 percent approving of the way he handled his job, continuing an upward trend since a low of 38 percent the previous October. The day after his address, with only eight weeks to New Hampshire’s opening primary election, pro- and anti-Johnson Democratic pundits agreed with those in the Republican Party that the president would probably beat Eugene McCarthy by a margin of 5 to 1.

  The same day as Johnson’s speech, as though ordered by Johnson himself, the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong, after ten days of the heaviest fighting of the war, stopped all ground combat. The U.S. military guessed that the enemy was gathering fresh troops and supplies. The Selective Service announced that a total of 302,000 men would be drafted into the army in 1968, an increase of 72,000 over 1967.

  Since American democracy imposes no limits on a citizen’s delusions of grandeur, there is always this question: If you were invited to the White House, would you give the president a piece of your mind, thereby publicly displaying bad manners, or would you be nice and waste the opportunity?

  In January 1968, Eartha Kitt, a small and delicate-looking black cabaret singer, who had built her career in trendy Paris Left Bank clubs of the late 1950s, was confronted with such a decision when the president’s wife, Lady Bird Johnson, invited her to a “ladies’ lunch” at the White House. In conjunction with the president’s newly outlined concerns, the topic was “What Citizens Can Do to Help Insure Safe Streets.” Some fifty women were seated in the yellow-walled family dining room, ten to a table, with matching gold-rimmed plates and gold cutlery. The meal went from crab bisque to Lady Bird’s favorite peppermint dessert. Woman after woman, mostly from privileged white backgrounds, spoke about their theories of the causes of street crime. But the fifty sat in stunned silence as Kitt leaned against the podium and said in her distinct porcelain voice, “You send the best of this country off to be shot and maimed. They rebel in the street. They will take pot and they will get high. They don’t want to go to school because they’re going to be snatched off from their mothers to be shot in Vietnam.”

  Different reporters were leaked slightly different versions of the encounter. In the Time magazine version she said, “No wonder the kids rebel and take pot—and in case you don’t understand the lingo that’s marijuana.”

 
; After a moment of silence, Mrs. Richard J. Hughes, wife of the Democratic governor of New Jersey, said, “I feel morally obligated. May I speak in defense of the war?” She said her first husband had been killed in World War II and that she had eight sons, one an air force veteran. “None wants to go to Vietnam, but all will go, they and their friends.” She added that none of her sons smoked marijuana, and the guests, somewhat relieved, applauded while Kitt stared at her with arms folded.

  Mrs. Johnson, noticeably pale, some said on the verge of tears, stood up and walked to the podium, somewhat in the way a good hostess would hurry to a trouble spot at a cocktail party to smooth it over, and politely suggested, “Because there is a war on—and I pray that there will be a just and honest peace—that still doesn’t give us a free ticket not to try to work for better things such as against crime in the streets, better education, and better health for our people. Crime in the streets is one thing that we can solve. I am sorry I can’t speak as well or as passionately on conditions of slums as you, because I have not lived there.”

  Kitt, the daughter of South Carolina sharecroppers, who as a teenager supported her family from a Harlem sweatshop, explained, “I have to say what is in my heart. I have lived in the gutters.”

  Mrs. Johnson, with candor and remarkable grace, replied, “I am sorry. I cannot understand the things that you do. I have not lived with the background you have.”

  And there it was, America in microcosm—the well-intentioned white liberals unable to comprehend black anger. Everyone wanted to comment on the widely reported incident, many applauding Kitt’s courage, many appalled by her rudeness. Martin Luther King said that although the singer was the First Lady’s guest, it was “a very proper gesture” because it “described the feelings of many persons” and that the “ears” of the Johnsons are “somewhat isolated from expressions of what people really feel.”

  Gene Roberts was removed from his beloved civil rights beat at The New York Times in the beginning of 1968 and reassigned to Saigon. Compared to civil rights, the Vietnam story seemed quiet. “I thought I had left the action.” In Washington he got a round of briefings from the U.S. government. At the CIA briefing he asked if a recent battle had been a victory. The CIA official said, “There are six good reasons to consider this a victory.” He went through the six reasons. Roberts then asked, “Is there any reason to consider it a defeat?”

  “There are eight good reasons to consider it a defeat,” the official replied, and he listed them.

  At the White House, Roberts was briefed by a top-ranking member of the administration whose identity he promised not to expose. “Forget the war,” he was told. “The war is over. Now we have to win the peace. The thing to keep your eye on is”—and he said this as though revealing a secret code—“IR8 rice.”

  “What?”

  “IR8 rice!” The U.S. government had done large-scale experiments and found that IR8 rice had two high-yield crops a year. This, he assured Roberts, was the big story in Vietnam at the moment.

  Roberts arrived in Saigon shortly after the Western New Year and started asking about IR8 rice. No one had heard of it. Finally, he learned that a rice festival was being held in the most secure province of South Vietnam. In fact, it was an IR8 rice festival. Crude bleachers were set up in the small rural village. In a corner, several farmers were squatting on their haunches, chewing on long blades of grass. All over the world farmers cluster and chew on grass. Roberts, who grew up in a farming area, recognized the scene and decided that a chat with these farmers would probably be worthwhile. He walked over with his translator and squatted by them.

  “What do you think of this IR8 rice?”

  The farmer exploded in an angry staccato burst of sound. The interpreter said, “He has some reservations about it.” Roberts then insisted that the translator give a word-for-word first-person translation. He asked the question again. Again syllables spat out of the farmer’s mouth as though from an automatic weapon.

  “Basically,” the interpreter explained, “he said, ‘Fuck IR8 rice.’ ” The other farmers were nodding in approval as the farmer continued and the translator said, “ ‘My daddy planted Mekong Delta rice and so did his daddy and his daddy before that. If it was good enough for all those generations, why do we need something different?’ ”

  The other farmers were still nodding enthusiastically.

  “Well,” Roberts wanted to know, “if you feel that way, why did you come to the IR8 rice festival?”

  The farmer barked out more syllables. “Because your president”—he was referring to South Vietnamese president Nguyen Van Thieu as he pointed his finger at Roberts—“your president sent a bunch of men with rifles who ordered me onto the bus.”

  Somehow, Roberts reasoned, there was a story in this, but it was difficult. His government source had been promised anonymity. But there was the program—or its failure. While he was still laboring on the IR8 rice story, his turn came up for the daily breaking news story. Fighting had broken out in Da Nang on the northern coast of South Vietnam near the old provincial capital of Hue. This was near the north-south border, and there had been rumors of a big North Vietnamese push across the border. Roberts got on a plane for Da Nang. As the plane banked for the north, he looked out the window and saw Saigon below—in flames. He never did write the IR8 rice story.

  Early that morning, January 30, the Vietnamese New Year, the air base at Da Nang was hit as part of an attack by sixty-seven thousand pro–North Vietnam troops on thirty-six provincial capitals and five major cities including Saigon.

  In the middle of the preceding night, fifteen men led by Nguyen Van Sau, an illiterate farmer from the outskirts of Saigon, had gathered in a Saigon garage. Nguyen Van Sau had joined the cause four years earlier, assigned to a sabotage battalion in Saigon. He had recently been admitted to the People’s Revolutionary Party as a reward for his good work. He and his group had been quietly moving ammunition and explosives hidden in baskets of tomatoes into the neighborhood around the garage. Far more than the many deeds done by the other sixty-seven thousand, the work of this group of slightly more than a dozen fighters would come to epitomize around the world what was called the Tet Offensive. What was special about Nguyen Van Sau’s group was that their attack had the best press coverage.

  His mission was to attack the U.S. embassy, which was a convenient location for coverage by the Saigon-based press corps, many of whom lived in the neighborhood. Up until then, most Vietnam War battles were reported on after they happened, or at best, if the battle was long enough, reporters would get in at midbattle. But from the U.S. embassy, their lines of communication were uninterrupted, stories could be filed in the neighborhood, film could be quickly shipped. And they had the time difference on their side. The attack occurred on January 30, but it was still January 29 in the United States. By January 30 and 31, the United States and the rest of world had the story in pictures and on film. American GIs were seen taking cover in the U.S. embassy compound, American corpses were seen lying still, being dragged, carried away on the back of vehicles. Viet Cong bodies were piling up. For several days, Americans saw images of U.S. soldiers either dead or ducking behind walls.

  Nguyen Van Sau and his group had packed into a taxi and a small Peugeot delivery truck and sped to the embassy, where they opened fire at the guards. The first report of the attack reached Associated Press’s New York bureau about fifteen minutes later, while the assailants were blowing the first hole in the compound wall. They rushed in firing, killing the first two guards, who seemed to have also killed Nguyen Van Sau. The guerrillas further penetrated the compound with rockets. News reports were already describing the attackers as “a suicide squad.” At 7:30 that morning, with the battle still in progress, it was 6:30 in the evening in New York and NBC Television’s Huntley-Brinkley Report had the story, though without film. They reported twenty suicide attackers holding the building. The report had some confusion about who was firing from the building and who was in t
he compound. But Americans got the idea, more or less. Finally, military police were able to use a jeep to ram open the front gate, which had been locked shut by the guards at the first moment of attack. Behind the MPs came the press corps with cameras to document the bodies, bullet holes, fallen embassy seal. By 9:15 the embassy had been secured and one of the most famous battles of the Vietnam War was over. Eight Americans had been killed.

  Everyone in Nguyen Van Sau’s group was killed. It had been a suicide mission. They had been given no plan for escaping. The 67,000 Viet Cong guerrilla fighters of the Tet Offensive had taken on a South Vietnam with almost 1.2 million soldiers, of which 492,000 were American. General William C. Westmoreland, who often bolstered his arguments with body counts of enemy dead, immediately claimed that the attack had failed and cost the enemy many lives. But he had been saying that he had seen “the light at the end of the tunnel” in the war and he was not being very much believed anymore. In truth, after a week the Viet Cong had failed to hold a single city and had lost about half of its fighting force. With seven more years of fighting, the guerrilla fighters of the Viet Cong never again played a leading role because they had been so diminished in the Tet Offensive. The fight was carried on by the regular troops of the Vietnam People’s Army, which Americans called the North Vietnamese army. It is now thought that Viet Cong four-star general Nguyen Chi Thanh had opposed the Tet plan, believing it was foolish to engage a superior force in conventional warfare, but he was killed in an American bombing before the issue was decided.