LYNDON JOHNSON MOST DEFINITELY did not agree.
A government employee, Johnson argued, had every right to make his case within the government. “But once a decision has been made, he has an equal obligation to carry it out with all his energy and wisdom,” the president wrote in his memoir. “If he cannot do so in good conscience, he should resign. He has no right to sabotage his president and his own government from within.”
Either way, the story was out, and it hurt Johnson. Polls put his approval rating at just 36 percent. Only 26 percent supported his handling of the war. The credibility gap was a major issue. One aide put it bluntly: “A majority of people believed he regularly lied to them.”
“I want war like I want polio,” Johnson groaned in private. “What you want and what your image is are two different things.”
Then Johnson’s reelection campaign got started, and the news got worse. In the first Democratic primary in New Hampshire, the president barely squeaked past Eugene McCarthy, an antiwar senator who had not been expected to pose a serious challenge. Johnson’s obvious vulnerability encouraged Senator Robert Kennedy, President John Kennedy’s younger brother, to jump into the race. Kennedy quickly surged into the lead.
On the night of March 31, Johnson addressed the nation from his desk in the Oval Office. He began by talking about Vietnam, announcing he had decided against further escalation of the war. He told Americans he was ordering a sharp reduction in the bombing of North Vietnam, in the hope that this would lead to peace talks with Hanoi.
Then he came to the part of the speech about his own future. Even as the words he’d written rolled onto the Teleprompter, Johnson’s closest aides didn’t know if he was going to read them. Johnson hesitated, glancing at Lady Bird, who was watching from behind the cameras. Then he continued.
March 31, 1968. Lyndon Johnson gives a television address from the Oval Office, announcing that he will not seek reelection as president.
“With America’s sons in the fields far away, with America’s future under challenge right here at home,” he said, “I do not believe that I should devote an hour or a day of my time to any personal partisan causes … Accordingly, I shall not seek, and will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your president.”
A few days later, North Vietnam agreed to begin peace talks in Paris.
* * *
“We have just toppled a president, or come as close to it as our system allows,” Tom Hayden, an antiwar activist, told the crowd at a conference in Princeton, New Jersey. “We have ended a war.”
Sitting in the audience, surrounded by pacifists and draft resisters, was Daniel Ellsberg. He had come to the conference to listen, to hear different points of view. Like everyone there, he wanted very badly to believe the war was over.
It wasn’t over. Not even close. The next few months would be among the darkest of Ellsberg’s life.
A woman at the conference introduced him to Martin Luther King, Jr.’s writings on nonviolent protest. Ellsberg was particularly impressed by King’s recent speeches against the Vietnam War. The next day, April 4, Martin Luther King was killed by an assassin in Memphis, Tennessee.
Horrified by what the country had lost, Ellsberg returned home to California. He lived alone in a Malibu beach house slightly sturdier than the last one. He began pitching in with Robert Kennedy’s presidential campaign. He admired Kennedy’s determination to end the war, and helped the candidate craft speeches in preparation for the pivotal California Democratic primary. On June 5, hours after winning the California primary, Robert Kennedy was killed by an assassin in Los Angeles.
Ellsberg was shaving when he heard the news.
“What!” he cried. “What? What is this?”
He sat on the edge of his bed and sobbed, tears carving tiny paths through the shaving cream on his cheeks. Maybe there’s no way, he thought, no way to change this country.
* * *
The Paris peace talks opened in May—and went nowhere. The United States insisted that North Vietnam stop supporting the war in the South. North Vietnam demanded that the government of South Vietnam be replaced by one that included representatives of the Viet Cong.
The war went on. Nineteen sixty-eight was the deadliest year yet.
“If in November this war is not over,” declared Richard Nixon, the Republican presidential nominee, “I say that the American people will be justified in electing new leadership, and I pledge to you that new leadership will end the war and win the peace.”
After serving for eight years as Eisenhower’s vice president, Nixon had lost a heartbreakingly close race for president to John Kennedy in 1960. In 1962 he’d run for governor of his home state of California, and lost again. Now, finally, he had an advantage—the public’s anger with Johnson and the Democrats for mishandling the Vietnam War. On the campaign trail, Nixon repeatedly promised to end the war “with honor.” He did not specify how.
The Democratic candidate for president, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, played right into Nixon’s hands. Humphrey was a harsh critic of the war—in private. He believed the president was moving too slowly to find a negotiated settlement. But he was not willing to risk Johnson’s wrath by saying so publicly. The result was an absolute disaster at the Democratic convention in Chicago. Inside the convention hall, Humphrey infuriated antiwar voters by blocking the adoption of a strong antiwar platform. Outside on the streets, police clashed violently with crowds of antiwar protestors.
Philip Caputo saw the riots up close. After surviving his tour in Vietnam, he had returned to the States and found work as a newspaper reporter in Chicago. He watched protestors taunting cops and smashing windows, police tossing tear gas and bashing heads with nightsticks. Police cars and ambulances lit scenes of chaos in flashing blue and red.
“Things were spinning out of control,” Caputo reflected. “American society had come to resemble a shattered mirror still in its frame.”
* * *
That’s when Daniel Ellsberg turned off the television. That’s when he completely tuned out.
Ellsberg spent time with his kids that summer, though they never knew when he’d be around. He barely showed up for work. When he did, colleagues thought he seemed jumpy, wired, unfocused.
“Most of my energy went instead, obsessively, into a bachelor private life,” he later said. “I was fighting an extreme case of powerlessness.”
Troubled by feeling so depressed, so detached from life, Ellsberg stared seeing Dr. Lewis Fielding, a psychiatrist, four days a week.
By summer’s end, Nixon led Humphrey by fifteen points in the polls. He was cruising to victory. Then, in late September, things suddenly got interesting.
At a speech in Salt Lake City, Humphrey summoned the nerve to break with Johnson. “I’m going to seek peace in every possible way,” he declared. “Come January, it’s a new ball game. Then I will make peace.”
With a month to go before the election, the race began to tighten.
Then came the news of unexpected progress at the Paris talks. The Americans agreed to halt the bombing of North Vietnam, and in exchange North Vietnamese negotiators agreed to sit down with representatives of the government of South Vietnam. Johnson announced the breakthrough on television on October 31. Renewed peace talks, he told the nation, would begin within days.
Humphrey drew even with Nixon in the polls.
That got Ellsberg’s attention. He picked up a “Humphrey for President” poster and taped it to the front of his Spitfire.
“It wasn’t a big contribution to the campaign,” he admitted, “though the tape did take paint off my hood.”
* * *
After running the best campaign of his life, Richard Nixon watched his hard-earned lead evaporate. “The bombing halt undercut one of my most effective campaign issues,” he later explained, “the inability of the Democratic leadership to win a permanent peace.”
But if peace talks undermined Nixon’s chances to win the election, Nixon was prepared to undermine the peace talks.
On October 31, John Mitchell, Nixon’s campaign manager, picked up the phone and called a woman named Anna Chennault.
“Anna, I’m speaking on behalf of Mr. Nixon,” Mitchell told Chennault. “It’s very important that our Vietnamese friends understand our Republican position and I hope you have made that very clear to them.”
Born in China in 1925, Chennault was fiercely anti-communist, and chair of the Republican Women for Nixon. She had agreed, if necessary, to use her contacts to convey secret messages on Nixon’s behalf to Nguyen Van Thieu, the president of South Vietnam. It now became necessary. The message was straightforward: urge President Thieu to refuse to participate in the Paris peace talks. Tell him to hold out for a Nixon victory, tell him Nixon will be a better ally to South Vietnam than Humphrey.
During the last week of the presidential campaign, Mitchell called Chennault every day. Chennault relayed the messages to Bui Diem, South Vietnam’s ambassador to the United States, and he cabled the notes to Thieu in Saigon.
“I am regularly in touch with the Nixon entourage,” Bui Diem wrote in one of the cables. “Many Republican friends have contacted me and encouraged us to stand firm.”
A November 2 poll showed Humphrey leading Nixon by three points.
That same day, Chennault repeated her message to Bui Diem. “Tell your boss to hold on a while longer.”
In Saigon, Thieu announced he would not participate in the peace talks. Without Thieu, the talks stalled again. It was a crushing letdown to American voters.
At a rally in Texas, Nixon spoke of his own disappointment. “The prospects for peace,” he said, “are not as bright as they looked only a few days ago.”
* * *
“This is treason!” roared Lyndon Johnson.
What Nixon didn’t know was that the CIA had bugs in President Thieu’s office. American agents routinely intercepted cables between the South Vietnamese embassy and Saigon, and listened in on Bui Diem’s phone conversations. Johnson knew exactly what Nixon was up to.
“It would rock the world if it were known that Thieu was conniving with the Republicans,” he told aides. “Can you imagine what people would say if it were known that Hanoi has met all these conditions and then Nixon’s conniving with them kept us from getting it?”
Did Johnson want to rock the world forty-eight hours before the election? Did he want to tell Americans that one of the candidates for president was sabotaging his effort to end the Vietnam War? He wasn’t sure. In need of advice, he called his old senate colleague Everett Dirksen, a Republican from Illinois.
“I want to talk to you as a friend, and very confidentially,” Johnson began, “because I think we’re skirting on dangerous ground.” The president detailed Nixon’s sneaky maneuverings. “I can identify him, because I know who’s doing this,” he told Dirksen. “What do you think we oughta do about it?”
Dirksen said, “I better get in touch with him.”