by Joshua Zeitz
For grunts on the front line, Vietnam was a grim battleground. Over 60 percent of the country’s topography consisted of densely vegetated highlands where Vietcong guerrillas successfully camouflaged themselves among the million or so Vietnamese citizens who dwelled in sparsely settled hamlets. Most American combat troops spent their days “humping” the hills and mountains amid scorching heat and humidity and carrying out “search and destroy missions,” the aim of which was to kill as many NLF fighters as possible. Unlike past wars, in which the objective was to capture and hold territory, Vietnam required combat units to rack up a body count. Contending with the thick heat and heavy rain, working on little sleep but an excess of stress, suffering hundreds of paper-thin cuts from the elephant grass, which sometimes climbed ten feet tall, and enduring painful blisters, swelling, and skin decay on their feet, servicemen had to make life-and-death decisions in the blink of an eye about which Vietnamese to regard as noncombatants and which to regard as VC. Because the enemy made a practice of hiding among civilians and brutally coercing noncombatants into providing them aid and cover, many American combat units stopped differentiating altogether. According to the rules of engagement, in so-called free-fire zones they were permitted to shoot anyone or anything without compunction. “When I got to Nam,” explained one veteran, “it was like black had turned into white because I was totally unprepared. . . . You’re so scared, that you’ll shoot at anything.”
“I went to Vietnam a basic naïve young man of eighteen,” remembered a combat paratrooper who served with the 173rd Airborne Division in 1969. “Before I reached my nineteenth birthday, I was an animal.” Like many grunts, under the strain of combat he descended into wanton, criminal violence. He cut off the ears and fingers of VC dead and wore them on a string around his neck. He shot civilians, whose deaths only drove up his unit’s body count. He participated in the gang rape and murder of a young, pregnant Vietnamese woman. “After a while, it really bothered me,” the soldier told a reporter. “I started saying to myself, What would I do if someone would do something like this to my child? To my mother. . . . I was in charge of a group of animals, and I had to be the biggest animal there. I allowed things to happen. I had learned not to care. And I didn’t care.”
The most famous example of American war crimes in Vietnam involved Lieutenant William L. Calley, the commander of Charlie Company’s first platoon—a unit attached to Task Force Barker of the American Division’s Eleventh Infantry Brigade. In March 1968, Calley received orders from his direct superior to clear out the small hamlet of My Lai 4. Though most of the villagers at My Lai were women, children, and elderly men, and though an official inquiry later found that Charlie Company did not draw enemy fire from the town, Calley’s troops unleashed an orgy of violence and destruction, rounding up and summarily gunning down anywhere between 350 and 500 innocent civilians. The murder victims included scores of young children. Military officials concealed the details of the slaughter until late 1969, when the independent journalist Seymour Hersh broke the story. In March 1971, Calley was convicted of twenty-two counts of murder and sentenced to life in prison. Richard Nixon promptly commuted the sentence to five years of house arrest, of which Calley served only three.
Philip Caputo, who later earned acclaim for his war memoirs, wrote that “out there, lacking restraints, sanctioned to kill, confronted by a hostile country and a relentless enemy, we sank into a brutish state.” The mother of Private Paul Meadlo, a participant in the My Lai massacre, spoke for many parents when she mourned, “I gave them a good boy, and they made him a murderer.”
For those working-class teenagers who served in the war, what might have been the best years of their lives became a nightmare that many later found impossible to shake. Leroy Quintana, who served in the 101st Airborne Division, remembered facing a long line of armed Vietcong soldiers. “I was shivering in the mud,” he said, “and this is how bad it was: I wanted my mom. . . . When it’s really, really down, everything becomes primal.” Michael Herr, a reporter for Esquire who chronicled the lives of ordinary servicemen in Southeast Asia, once observed that “it was never easy to guess the ages of the Marines at Khe Sanh since nothing like youth ever lasted in their faces for very long.”
Enduring the stress, alienation, and depression of combat service was sometimes as difficult as dodging enemy bullets. Grunts lived for those rare “bennies” like a letter from home, a C ration of canned fruit, a hot shower at the rear, or ice cream. They also turned to drugs, especially in the latter years of the ground war. Southeast Asia was fertile ground for narcotics cultivation, and Vietnamese marijuana had THC levels between five times and twenty times that of American grass. Suppliers regularly emptied out cartons of tobacco cigarettes and filled them with potent, homegrown marijuana. By 1969, roughly 60 percent of all combat troops were smoking marijuana on a regular basis. In the 1970s, heroin also became widely available. Unlike the expensive, diluted product sold on American streets, heroin in Vietnam was 95 percent pure, and it was cheap. Small vials that sold for $200 in the United States cost only $2 in Vietnam. By 1971, roughly 10 percent of combat troops were heroin addicts, while another 20 percent were recreational users.
Any administration would have been hard-pressed to manage the political fallout of a morally controversial war that claimed the deaths of over thirty thousand servicemen between 1965 and 1968 alone and whose horrors were nightly on display in every American living room, courtesy of extensive television news coverage. But Johnson and his aides ensnared themselves in a trap of their own making. Initially certain that the conflict could be won in six months—and loath to rally popular support for a war that might deflect attention, will, and resources from its cherished domestic agenda—the administration downplayed Vietnam at every critical juncture. Initially, neither LBJ nor any senior cabinet member or White House aide announced or acknowledged that the president had committed ground forces to Southeast Asia. When reporters observed marine landings at Danang and Phu Bai and a buildup of soldiers and airmen elsewhere in South Vietnam, the administration dissembled, insisting that the mission had not changed. “American troops have been sent [to] South Vietnam recently with the mission of protecting key installations there,” the State Department answered casually. Only in June 1965 did the department’s spokesperson acknowledge that the government had committed to lend “combat support to Vietnamese forces,” though, when asked when the president had granted that authorization, he answered, “I couldn’t be specific but it is something that has developed over the past several weeks.” The inevitable swell of coverage obligated George Reedy, who was then still the White House press secretary, to issue a clarifying statement. Yet Reedy backtracked, insisting that there had been “no change in the mission of the United States combat units in Vietnam in recent days or weeks. . . . The primary mission of these troops is to secure and safeguard important military installations.” Offhandedly, Reedy acknowledged that General William Westmoreland, the American commander on the ground, enjoyed the authority to “employ these troops in support of Vietnamese forces faced with aggressive attack . . . when in his judgment, the general military situation urgently requires it.” His non-denial denial was so fundamentally dishonest that even Westmoreland later judged it “a masterpiece of obliquity.”
The response to the administration’s dissimulation was swift and overwhelmingly negative. But the White House soon compounded its problems. If Johnson would not acknowledge that he had committed the nation to war, he certainly could not disclose its cost. In 1965, LBJ buried Vietnam expenditures—which totaled roughly $5 billion—in the Pentagon budget. It would shock members of Congress when, six months later, in the middle of the fiscal year, the administration was forced to request a sizable supplementary appropriations package to cover the swiftly mounting costs of the war. By December 1965, when Murrey Marder of the Washington Post first introduced the term, the idea of the “credibility gap” had become a fixture of opposition to
the administration. It was a pattern that continued through Johnson’s presidency. “The old C&O canal which runs north from Georgetown is bounded by the Cumberland Gap at one end and the Credibility Gap at the other,” one satirist noted. By 1967, even as LBJ continued to downplay the budgetary implications of Vietnam, war costs approached $26.5 billion for the budget cycle that began in July. Public polling revealed that a majority of the population regarded LBJ as a “conner.” “The President,” McPherson lamented, “is simply not believed.”
As antiwar sentiment took root on college campuses and in communities across the country, and as the press grew ever more skeptical of Johnson’s tangled approach to the truth, the burden of dissemblance fell squarely on the shoulders of Bill Moyers, who served as White House press secretary from mid-1965 through January 1967. The clean-cut preacher proved supremely capable of playing hardball. When CBS News aired a televised report that showed American servicemen cold-bloodedly torching the village of Cam Ne—the troops used Zippo lighters to burn civilians out of their small, bamboo huts, ostensibly to root out NLF fighters—the White House press operation swung into full tilt. Moyers summoned Frank Stanton, the president of CBS News, to the Oval Office, where, as journalist Morley Safer later wrote, “Johnson threatened that, unless CBS got rid of me and ‘cleaned up its act,’ the White House would ‘go public’ with information about Safer’s ‘Communist ties.’” Moyers would later deny the details of the meeting, though at the time he privately assured the president that he would explore “steps we can take to improve coverage of the Vietnam War.” He warned that “we will never eliminate altogether the irresponsible and prejudiced coverage of men like Peter Arnett and Morris [sic] Safer, men who are not American and who do not have the basic American interest at heart.” (Safer was Canadian-born; Arnett, from New Zealand.)
By late 1966, some members of the press spoke openly of the “Moyers Gap”—that yawning aperture between truth and dissemblance, particularly on the administration’s Vietnam policy. Others inside the White House quietly agreed. “The credibility gap was purely a Moyers invention because he’d answer too damned many questions,” Jake Jacobsen, an LBJ intimate from Texas who joined the senior staff in 1966, believed. “He wouldn’t ever say, ‘I don’t know.’ He just had to have an answer for everything, and that creates a credibility gap. Whether it was the President’s answer or his, you never did know that.” As the administration continued to obscure the mounting human and financial costs of the war, Moyers found himself in an impossible bind—particularly as he grew uncomfortable with the administration’s policy in Vietnam. He became “less and less successful as Presidential Press Secretary,” Harry McPherson observed, in no small part because he engaged in frequent “background” discussions in which he attempted to represent the president as fundamentally conflicted about the war. The result was confusion among the press corps: Should reporters believe what the president said, what Moyers said publicly, or what Moyers said privately? Or none of the above?
As the press grew more sharply critical of his Vietnam policy, LBJ became more distrustful of Moyers—his onetime favorite, who now seemed to garner better coverage than the president—and of his media-friendly aides. He ordered McPherson to file weekly reports with Moyers, detailing every conversation he had with members of the press, and for a time prohibited him altogether from speaking with reporters. When the New York Times Magazine assigned a profile of Califano, Johnson forbade his domestic policy chief to cooperate. “You just tell these reporters you’re not in the interview business,” he snapped. “Then you don’t have to worry about getting misquoted.” The policy likely cut against Johnson’s best interests. As more reporters were apt to doubt that Moyers was furnishing them with a complete view of the truth, their inability to speak with top aides like Califano and McPherson, who refused to return their calls, created an atmosphere of diminishing trust.
So wary was the president of high-level leaks that in late 1965 he ordered Marvin Watson to keep a log of all inbound calls to senior White House aides—a highly inadvisable scheme that Watson, true to fashion, launched with gusto. It took little time before reporters understood that the switchboard logs were intended to surveil their contact with administration officials. When members of the press corps challenged Moyers on this “gum-shoe tactic,” the press secretary deflected, rejecting the charge as a “very clever, but inaccurate and unwarranted description.” But Moyers evidently thought the operation foolish. The following January, he quietly shut it down. Watson, he explained with thinly camouflaged contempt, had “finished whatever he wanted to study and they’re not doing it anymore.”
The more the credibility gap widened, the more mistrustful LBJ grew. When in 1967 the New York Times ran an inside story about the administration’s education task force, the president called Doug Cater on the carpet and berated him for rank disloyalty. Infuriated, Cater sleuthed around the West Wing to determine who had leaked the report.
“I did,” Califano told him with bemusement.
“Well, I’ll never tell him,” Cater assured his colleague.
“He told me to put it out!”
The president had in fact forgotten his instruction to Califano that the commission’s report be made public.
• • • • •
Charles Schultze would later observe that when he replaced Kermit Gordon as budget director in June 1965, “it was still the general economic opinion, not really having any appreciation of what the expenditure requirements on Vietnam were going to be,” that the economy would continue to hum along with steady growth and low inflation. Even that fall, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara had assured Americans that it was a “myth that education, or welfare, or health or other civilian needs have to be cut back to meet our defense requirements. This is a rich and powerful country, and we can do whatever needs to be done to educate our people and fight poverty and at the same time we can spend what needs to be spent to assure an adequate national defense.” The intellectual foundation of the Great Society assumed that if the president’s economists pulled the right levers, they could manufacture uninterrupted growth and full employment at low inflation. Later events would call this wisdom into question, but when McNamara informed the president in December that he would need to request an $11 billion supplemental appropriation for the current fiscal year—almost double the amount that Congress had originally appropriated—his aides worried for the first time that the economy might quickly become overheated, leading to runaway inflation. Worse still, the war would require an even greater commitment of resources for the 1967 fiscal year, which would begin on July 1, 1966. Reluctant to acknowledge how swiftly the conflict had escalated, Johnson downplayed McNamara’s forecast and requested $10.3 billion; by the end of the fiscal year, in June 1967, the total climbed to roughly $20 billion.
A former economics professor who had served in the 1950s as a staff member at the Council of Economic Advisers and, later, as assistant budget director under both Kennedy and Johnson, Schultze had very little direct exposure to the president before Gordon recommended him as his successor. As he strode into the Oval Office to accept the position, he assumed that he would spend “half an hour, an hour,” with Johnson. The role of budget director would place him at the nexus of domestic and foreign policy, at just the moment when the economic assumptions undergirding the Great Society threatened to come loose. LBJ merely grunted and said, “How are you? Will you take the job?” When Schultze indicated that he would be honored to serve, Johnson replied curtly, “Good. Glad to have you. Next appointment.”
In the coming two years, Schultze bore the thankless task of paying for both steadily rising costs associated with the war in Vietnam and a growing roster of Great Society programs, all while trying to keep inflation in check. “A lot of this was not only additional troops, but the fact that aircraft attrition was a little bit higher, and that was something you’d make a new estimate maybe every month on,
” Schultze explained. “Ammunition consumption was a little higher. It was a gradual revision of this production schedule, of that production schedule, a few more troops here, a few more troops there.” Having worked as a staff economist at the Office of Price Stabilization during the Korean War, he understood that military conflicts were inevitably difficult to forecast with accuracy or precision. The Truman and Eisenhower administrations had submitted cumulative requests for $45 billion in supplemental appropriations above and beyond what Congress authorized for Korea. In the end analysis, Vietnam ultimately came in closer to budget than either Korea or World War II. “The real problem here,” Schultze argued, “was, for all sorts of reasons, an unwillingness to admit publicly the war was going to cost a lot more.” LBJ feared that if he admitted the full scope of engagement—or if he embraced the advice of both Schultze and Gardner Ackley, the chairman of the CEA, that the administration raise personal and corporate income taxes to prevent the economy from overheating—he would box himself into a corner with Congress. “Because obviously the whole game of the Republicans, naturally, would have been, ‘Why the devil should we give you these extra taxes when you won’t tell us how much more the war is going to cost?’”
Asking for the tax increase necessarily exposed the administration to Republican demands that Johnson trim domestic spending—something that he was singularly opposed to doing. “He had no stomach for it,” Lady Bird later said of her husband’s outlook on Vietnam. “It wasn’t the war he wanted. The one he wanted was on poverty and ignorance and disease and that was worth putting your life into.”
Unable—or unwilling—to ask Congress for a tax increase, Johnson worked every other lever available to him. Not until January 1967 did LBJ ask for a tax surcharge, and not until mid-1968 did Congress approve one. In the meantime, the White House relied on a hopeless jawbone strategy. “Johnson pushed me constantly to move on some price or another,” Califano wrote, “as he read reports from the Council of Economic Advisers, or noticed some increase on the AP or UPI wires. Shoe prices went up, so LBJ slapped export controls on hides to increase the supply of leather. Reports that color television sets would sell at high prices came across the wire. Johnson told me to ask RCA’s David Sarnoff to hold them down. Domestic lamb prices rose. LBJ directed McNamara to buy cheaper lamb from New Zealand for the troops in Vietnam.” The president ordered the government to cease new furniture purchases in order to reduce aggregate demand for (and thus the price of) lumber. He instructed Califano and the CEA to “move on household appliances, paper cartons, newsprint, men’s underwear, women’s hosiery, glass containers, cellulose, chlorine, air conditioners, and caustic soda, which is used to make soap and paper.” When the price of eggs began to climb, he encouraged government officials to voice concerns about the health effects of high cholesterol.