by Hill, Clint
“See that aircraft sitting at the end of the runway over there?” he said, pointing into the distance. “In the event of incoming missiles, you get yourself, the president, and Westmoreland on board. The pilot has instructions to take off immediately and get you the hell out of here. They’ve got their engines running, ready to go.”
I gave a slight nod in acknowledgment, my jaw clenching at the unfathomable but all too real possibility.
I moved out of the way just long enough for a few photographs to be snapped and then urged the president to get into the backseat of the Air Force sedan that was prepositioned nearby, while I took my place in the right front passenger seat.
After a brief meeting with the senior unit commanders, we took the president to a hospital, where he walked down the rows of identical beds filled with injured young men. General Westmoreland walked alongside him, telling stories of the bravery of the men as President Johnson pinned Purple Hearts onto the chests of their hospital pajamas, looked into their eyes, and told them how proud he and the rest of America were of the job they were doing to defeat the North Vietnamese.
We drove to another part of the base, where 2,500 servicemen were assembled along the runway and a makeshift stage had been erected. President Johnson and General Westmoreland led a group of dignitaries up to the stage as “Hail to the Chief” blared over the loudspeaker and 2,500 hands went to foreheads in a unanimous salute to their commander in chief. Standing next to General Westmoreland, President Johnson brought his hand to his heart as an honor guard presented the colors. The president was dressed in his khaki ranch clothes with a short-sleeved camp-style shirt—he’d removed the zippered jacked in the sweltering heat of the hospital and handed it to me to carry—and was hatless, so that when the hot tropical breeze kicked up, the long strands of hair lying across the top of his head blew straight up in a rather un-presidential look that many newspapers would run on their front pages the following day.
After a brief introduction, President Johnson and General Westmoreland stepped down from the stage and climbed into the back of an open-top Army jeep that was waiting nearby. Standing up out of where the roof would be, they each grabbed the roll bar, and just as the jeep started to pull away I stepped onto the rear platform directly behind them. In the event of incoming missiles . . .
It looked like a sea of camouflage-green helmets as we passed by in our one-vehicle parade, the president solemnly acknowledging the saluting men he referred to as “my boys” while I stared straight ahead, my ears on high alert for any sudden, unusual sound.
After reviewing the troops, President Johnson returned to the stage, holding his hand to his heart as the national anthems of both the United States and South Vietnam were played, and then proceeded to take the opportunity to present a number of medals and awards to enlisted men and officers. Finally, he approached the microphone to express his appreciation to everyone at Cam Ranh Bay.
“The enemy cannot win now in Vietnam,” he said with unabashed confidence. “I bring you the assurance of what you have fought to achieve.” The Communist enemy, he said, “can harass, he can terrorize, he can inflict casualties while taking far greater losses himself. But he cannot win. You—each of you—has seen to that.”
After wishing all the men a merry Christmas, the president whispered something to General Westmoreland. I had an uneasy feeling as the general stepped up to the microphone.
“The president would like you to approach the stage,” Westmoreland said.
Oh God.
“Men, fall out!”
They were hesitant at first, but then President Johnson threw his hands up in the air, beckoning them to come forward. He marched down the steps as the men ran toward him, clamoring for prime position to get a handshake from the President of the United States. I stayed as close as possible to him, constantly scanning the crowd of servicemen and the skies above as the president shook hand after hand.
“Where ya from, son?” he asked, over and over.
“Racine, Wisconsin!” “Mobile, Alabama, sir!” “Trenton, New Jersey!”
As they called out their beloved hometowns and states, a look of jubilance spread across their faces. You could just see the letters they’d be writing home that night, telling their loved ones how the President of the United States shook their hand and when he asked “Where ya from?” they’d been so proud to tell him. It broke my heart to see these young men, so far from their families, knowing I’d be back home by Christmas, while a good percentage of them would return mangled by war, or worse still, in a flag-draped casket.
Finally, after nearly two hours on the ground, we returned to Air Force One without incident. It was a relief to be airborne once again, but I knew still more challenges lay ahead. Up next, the unknown in Karachi.
AN AIR FORCE C-141 transport cargo plane carrying advance agents had taken off shortly before Air Force One and would arrive ahead of us to secure the airport. There wouldn’t be much time in between, and all I could do was trust that the agents could get everything in place before we touched down.
We landed in Karachi at two o’clock, and after confirming with the agents on the ground, I followed President Johnson out of the plane and into a nearby building at the airport where President Ayub Khan was waiting. They greeted each other with a warm hug and then sat talking like two old friends. I remained close, and at one point President Johnson summoned me, requesting some refreshments.
I contacted the Air Force stewards, who promptly brought a variety of beverages and snacks from Air Force One. The meeting lasted over an hour as the plane got refueled, and then we were airborne again, headed for Rome.
Top Secret messages had been flying back and forth between the White House Situation Room and embassies all over Europe, trying to arrange the logistics for President Johnson’s last-minute request for a meeting with Italy’s president, Giuseppe Saragat, and an audience with the pope. You don’t just pop in on the pope. But that’s exactly what President Johnson wanted to do.
Meanwhile, the dozens of members of the press traveling on the press plane were almost at their wits’ end. Word had gotten back to the president that they felt like they were being held captive. Like the rest of us, they hadn’t slept or showered, and they felt like they were prisoners on an aircraft with no idea where they were going or when they would return home. They weren’t buying the line that all the details were being ironed out as we went along, but that was God’s honest truth. The only person who really knew what was happening was the president himself, and he was keeping everything close to the vest. The president had no pity on the press pool.
“Here I am desperately seeking peace, and they’re bitching about their comfort,” he fumed.
There were security concerns about landing at Rome’s Fiumicino Airport due to a large, active anti-American community in the area that would love nothing better than to embarrass President Johnson, and while the smaller Ciampino Airport was less accessible and much easier to control, there we faced a lack of equipment and ground personnel, and a runway barely capable of handling Air Force One. Of the two options, Ciampino won.
The next problem was the transportation from the airport to visit President Saragat, who happened to be staying at one of his official residences, Castel Porziano, some fifteen miles outside central Rome. With more advance notice about the president’s plans than the rest of us, Colonel Jim Cross had had the foresight to have two Huey helicopters transported to Spain in an Air Force transport plane so they’d be nearby if the visit to the pope and Saragat became a reality. As soon as the visit was a go, the helicopters were sent to Rome, but once they arrived, they had to be reassembled. Because everything was so last-minute, the helicopters weren’t ready when we arrived at Ciampino at 8:30 in the evening local time.
The schedule was already tight—with just fifteen minutes allowed for the Saragat visit—and now, here we were on the ground with no way to get the president safely to the Italian president’s residence. The U.S.
Navy had some helicopters in the area, but they were much smaller, older, and far less comfortable than the Hueys. We had no choice. We needed them to make the airlift from Ciampino. Space was extremely limited, so it was decided that Rufus Youngblood would go with President Johnson in my place. I watched as the old Navy helicopters slowly lifted off from Ciampino for Porziana. Radio communications were limited, and I waited and listened intently for word indicating a successful arrival. Finally, it came through. By this time, the Army unit reported they had their helicopters ready to go, so we sent them to Porziana and used them to take the president from there to the Vatican.
The landing at the Vatican was just as tense, however, because of the lack of space for such an operation, the fact that the pilots had never landed there before, and that it was to be done in secret, at night. In fact, it was the first time anyone had ever paid a visit to the pope via helicopter. It was a tribute to pilots Peter Rice and Bill Carlson’s expertise that everything went smoothly, and on schedule.
After spending almost two hours at the Vatican, the presidential party was back at Ciampino, and at 11:05 p.m. we were finally headed back to the United States, with just one stop left for refueling at Lajes Air Force Base in the Azores, Portugal.
President Johnson was in a great mood, feeling extremely pleased with the way the trip had turned out. He wandered through the plane talking about what he felt was a productive and worthwhile meeting with Pope Paul VI. Apparently there was a gift exchange during the meeting as well—the pope gave President Johnson a fifteenth-century painting, while the president’s offering was an eight-inch bronze bust of himself.
Everyone was relieved when President Johnson finally retired to his cabin, and all of us could try to get some sleep.
Meanwhile, Colonel Cross had contacted the commanding officer at Lajes and requested he keep the Base Post Exchange (PX) open so the personnel traveling on Air Force One could buy some Christmas gifts, since it was now Christmas Eve, and because of this whirlwind trip no one had had any time to shop. Unfortunately, the members of the press were taking a different route through Shannon, Ireland, so they would end up arriving home on Christmas Eve not only exhausted, irritated, and in desperate need of a shower but also empty-handed.
It was 1:35 in the morning local time when we landed, but the Air Force One passengers were ready to shop, and off they went to the PX. The president was still sound asleep in his cabin, so I told the other agents to go ahead and join everyone else while I remained with the aircraft.
I was standing at the foot of the ramp of Air Force One when all of a sudden President Johnson appeared in the doorway in his pajamas.
“Clint!” he called out. “Where the hell is everybody?”
“They’ve all gone to the PX to do some Christmas shopping while we refuel,” I explained. “It’s Christmas Eve, Mr. President.”
“Well, I need to do some shopping too,” he said. “Let’s go!”
He reached into the coat closet near the door and pulled out a trench coat, put it on over his pajamas, and trotted down the stairs. I grabbed an Air Force car and driver, and off to the base exchange we went.
As we walked through the store, the president greeted everyone with a big smile and a “Merry Christmas!” while peering into their shopping carts to inspect their purchases. He went straight for the baby department, picking out a few toys and clothes for his grandson, and then some bracelets and other items for Mrs. Johnson and his daughters. You’d think Santa Claus himself had just walked in from all the double takes we got. The press would have loved it and fought over the photos. For me, the image in my mind still makes me chuckle. Only Lyndon Johnson. And that’s how I happened to go shopping in the Azores in the middle of the night on Christmas Eve with the President of the United States in his pajamas.
AT 4:30 A.M. on December 24, 1967, we landed at Andrews Air Force Base. We had been gone for one hundred twelve hours and twenty minutes—over four and a half days; flown 28,210 miles; and spent nearly sixty hours of that time in the air. I flew back on Marine One with the president to the White House, and let me tell you, that was a wonderful sight to see. I was exhausted, enormously relieved to be delivering the president back home safely after such a chaotic and harried adventure, and eager to crawl into my own bed. But it was Christmas Eve, and the president wanted to go to Mass with his daughter Luci and her husband, Patrick. So I accompanied President Johnson to the seven o’clock Mass at St. Dominic’s Catholic Church in southwest Washington; we got back to the White House at 7:35, and then, finally, I was able to go home.
It was the first time in eight years that I’d been home for Christmas with my family. My son Chris was now eleven years old, and Corey was six, and as we opened presents on Christmas morning, I realized the last Christmas I’d been home was 1959, when Chris was just three years old and Corey born—and it was impossible for them to understand why all I wanted to do was sleep.
As 1967 came to an end, no one could have imagined what the next year would bring and how our country would be brought to its knees over and over again, and there I was, once again, smack-dab in the middle of some of our nation’s most traumatic moments.
27
* * *
1968
The crises began almost as soon as the calendar turned.
“I report to you that our country is challenged at home and abroad,” President Johnson said in his opening State of the Union remarks to Congress on January 17, 1968. There was still no end in sight to the war in Vietnam, and in this election year he knew there was much he had to prove. Despite the fact that Americans were more prosperous than ever before, with higher paychecks and more families owning their own homes, “there is in the land,” he noted, “a certain restlessness, a questioning.”
Four days later, the North Vietnamese Army launched a withering rocket and mortar attack on Khe Sanh, a strategic Marine outpost just fourteen miles south of the Demilitarized Zone between North and South Vietnam, and three days after that, one of our critical intelligence-gathering ships, the USS Pueblo, was seized by the North Koreans—the first time in more than one hundred years that an American naval vessel had been captured at sea. Then, in the predawn hours of January 31, during what was supposed to have been a multiday cease-fire in honor of Tet—the most important Vietnamese holiday, marking the Lunar New Year—the North Vietnamese conducted a coordinated surprise attack against military and civilian command and control centers in cities throughout South Vietnam, including a bold and blistering raid on the U.S. Embassy in Saigon. The numbers were staggering: over two hundred Americans dead, and nearly a thousand wounded, with more than two thousand civilian men, women, and children killed in Saigon alone. Yet General Westmoreland’s optimistic report back to Washington was that the Tet Offensive had been an “all-or-nothing, go-for-broke” proposition, in which the North Vietnamese had failed to take and hold any major installations and had suffered far greater losses than the allies.
Despite the sheer numbers of people killed, what had a far bigger impact on the public were the photographs and film footage by American journalists that made their way onto the front pages of newspapers and the television screens in every American living room. One photo, taken by Associated Press photographer Eddie Adams, showed the horrific image of a young North Vietnamese man, terror written all over his face, his hands tied behind his back, as South Vietnam’s national police chief fired a bullet, point-blank, into his head on a Saigon street, while children stood nearby.
BY THE BEGINNING of 1968, more than 11,000 Americans had been killed in Vietnam. United States troop strength had been building gradually since 1960, and although we now had nearly 500,000 members of the U.S. military in Vietnam, with the latest increase in attacks, General Westmoreland had requested reinforcements of 10,500 more men.
Ever since we returned from the around-the-world trip after Prime Minister Holt’s funeral, I had noticed that President Johnson was looking more and more haggard. Large bags under
his eyes were becoming more pronounced, and although he was still packing far more into any given day than most, the strain of the job was becoming physically evident.
When I made mention of this to a member of the staff and to the White House physician, they both told me that the president was barely sleeping. He was phoning the Situation Room at all hours of the night to determine the situation in Vietnam and the status of the seized ship, the USS Pueblo, and its crew. Every call to the Situation Room was logged, and sure enough, when I checked the logbook, nearly every night, calls from the president’s bedroom came in just before he retired, usually around midnight or one o’clock, and then there’d be another call at two, three, or four. The international crises were consuming him.
On Saturday, February 17, when I reported to the White House, I was informed that the president intended to make a surprise visit to some of the troops headed into combat. That afternoon, we flew to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, to Pope Army Airfield, where a brigade of paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne Division was getting ready to board a C-141 transport jet. I stood on one side of the doorway of the aircraft as President Johnson, on the other side, shook hands with each soldier as they boarded the plane. Equipped for combat, they carried field packs, canteens, sheath knives, and M-16 automatic rifles. It had to be frightening for these young men—many of them barely out of high school—to be sent off to a combat zone on the opposite side of the world, and for the president, I could see it was ripping him apart.
When all the men were on board, an officer gave the pilot the command to start the engines.
“Wait a minute,” President Johnson said. And then he turned to walk up the steps into the aircraft. Uh oh, I thought. What does he have in mind?
I followed him as he walked down the center aisle between the rows of helmeted troops, each lost in their own thoughts. President Johnson interrupted the silence.