President Johnson feared that the antiwar movement would drive him out of the White House. But in the end the war itself did it.
In October 1967, a handful of CIA analysts joined in the first big Washington march against the war. The president regarded the protesters as enemies of the state. He was convinced that the peace movement was controlled and financed by Moscow and Beijing. He wanted proof. He ordered Richard Helms to produce it.
Helms reminded the president that the CIA was barred from spying on Americans. He says Johnson told him: "I'm quite aware of that. What I want for you is to pursue this matter, and to do what is necessary to track down the foreign communists who are behind this intolerable interference in our domestic affairs." It is likely that LBJ expressed himself more plainly.
In a blatant violation of his powers under law, the director of central intelligence became a part-time secret police chief. The CIA undertook a domestic surveillance operation, code-named Chaos. It went on for almost seven years. Helms created a new Special Operations Group to run the spying on Americans, and he cannily hid it in the shadows of Angleton's counterintelligence staff. Eleven CIA officers grew long hair, learned the jargon of the New Left, and went off to infiltrate peace groups in the United States and Europe. The agency compiled a computer index of 300,000 names of American people and organizations, and extensive files on 7,200 citizens. It began working in secret with police departments all over America. Unable to draw a clear distinction between the far left and the mainstream opposition to the war, it spied on every major organization in the peace movement. At the president's command, transmitted through Helms and the secretary of defense, the National Security Agency turned its immense eavesdropping powers on American citizens.
Both the president and conservatives in Congress saw connections between the peace protests and the race riots rocking the United States. They wanted the CIA to prove that communists were behind them both. The agency tried its best.
In 1967, America's ghettoes had become war zones; seventy-five separate urban riots wracked the nation, resulting in 88 deaths, 1,397 injuries, 16,389 arrests, 2,157 convictions, and economic damage estimated at $664.5 million. Forty-three people had been killed in Detroit, twenty-six in Newark. Rage filled the streets of New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston, Cincinnati, Dayton, Cleveland, Youngstown, Toledo, Peoria, Des Moines, Wichita, Birmingham, and Tampa. On October 25, Senator John McClellan, an Arkansas Democrat and chairman of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, wrote to Helms seeking evidence that the Soviets were running the black-power movement in the United States. "The Subcommittee is very much interested in the operations of various militant organizations in this country," the senator wrote.
McClellan said that Moscow had created "an espionage or sabotage school in Ghana, Africa, for colored people" and that Americans had served as instructors. "Purportedly these teachers came from somewhere in California," the senator wrote. "It would be most helpful to the Subcommittee if the identity of any American teacher who returned to the United States were known as well as the identity of any student.... Your cooperation in this matter will indeed be appreciated."
The clandestine service cooperated. On October 31, 1967, Tom Karamessines sent a raw and unconfirmed rumor from a Miami Cuban to the White House. "A Negro training camp" had been established at a beach near Santiago de Cuba where "Negroes were being trained for subversive operations against the United States," the report said. "Their courses included English which was being taught by Soviet instructors." It continued: "Their subversive activities against the United States would include sabotage in connection with race riots directed at bringing a Negro revolution in the United States." It said that "150 Negroes are involved in the training program and some have already arrived in the United States."
Lyndon Johnson was enraged. "I'm not going to let the Communists take this government and they're doing it right now," he told Helms, Rusk, and McNamara during a ninety-five-minute rant on a Saturday afternoon, November 4, 1967. "I've got my belly full of seeing these people put on a Communist plane and shipped all over this country. I want someone to carefully look at who leaves this country, where they go, why they are going." This last remark was aimed pointedly at Helms.
But the CIA never found a shred of evidence that linked the leaders of the American left or the black-power movement to foreign governments. Helms took this unhappy fact to the president on November 15, 1967. He reported that while the CIA suspected that some members of the American left might have ideological affinities with Moscow or Hanoi, no evidence showed "that they act under any direction other than their own." Lyndon Johnson ordered Helms to intensify the search. It produced nothing beyond a continuing violation of the CIA's charter.
For millions of Americans, the war came home every night on television. On January 31, 1968, 400,000 communist troops hit almost every major city and military garrison in South Vietnam. The attack came on the first night of Tet, the lunar new year, and the enemy laid siege to Saigon and the major American bases at Hue and Khe Sanh. On February 1, television and still cameras captured the Saigon police chief as he executed a Vietcong prisoner in cold blood with a pistol shot to the head. The assault went on and on. Though the American counterattack was overwhelming--100,000 tons of bombs fell around Khe Sanh alone--the shock of the surprise attack was a devastating psychological defeat for the United States. Helms concluded that the CIA could not have predicted the Tet offensive because it had next to no intelligence on the enemy's intent.
On February 11, 1968, Helms pulled all his Vietnam experts together at headquarters. All but one of them--George Carver, still an optimist, though not for long--agreed on the following points: General Westmoreland, the American commander in Saigon, had no coherent strategy. It was useless to send more American troops. If the government and the army of South Vietnam did not pull together and fight the enemy, the United States should get out. Helms sent George Allen back to Saigon to assess the damage and to meet with President Thieu and Vice President Ky. Allen found the army of South Vietnam shattered and the two leaders at one another's throats. American soldiers were unable to defend the nation's cities; American spies were panicked and demoralized. Hanoi had won its greatest political victory since 1954, when it handed the French their final defeat at Dien Bien Phu.
Helms personally gave the president the deeply pessimistic conclusions. They destroyed all but the last of LBJ's enormous political will.
On February 19, as Hanoi mounted a second wave of Tet attacks, the president spoke privately with Dwight Eisenhower. The next day, at the Tuesday lunch at the White House, Helms listened as the president described the conversation.
"General Eisenhower said that Westmoreland carries more responsibility than any general in the history of this country," LBJ recounted. "I asked him how many allies he had under his command during World War II. He said, including U.S. and allied troops, he had about five million. I told him General Westmoreland had 500,000 men, so how could he say that Westmoreland had the greatest responsibility of any American general? He said it was a different kind of war and General Westmoreland doesn't know who the enemy is."
At last Lyndon Johnson understood that no strategy could survive the failure of intelligence in Vietnam. The United States could not defeat an enemy it could not understand. A few weeks later, he announced he would not seek re-election as the president of the United States.