Preface

“This is not Johnson’s war. This is America’s war. If I drop dead tomorrow, this war will still be with you,” Lyndon Johnson bellowed to journalist Chalmers Roberts from the White House Oval Office on October 13, 1967. But LBJ was wrong, and as it became evident that the war had become a sinkhole, the more Vietnam became Johnson’s war. Three weeks later LBJ confided to his principal advisors, “I am like the steering wheel of a car without any control.”¹

Lyndon Johnson’s War focuses on the repercussions from President Johnson’s failure to address the fundamental incompatibility between his political objectives at home and his military objectives in Vietnam. A Rip van Winkle who had gone to sleep in November 1963, when Johnson had taken over the presidency, and awoke in March 1968, when he announced he would not seek a second term, would look with bewilderment at the paths chosen by such an experienced political man as Lyndon Johnson. In retrospect, Lyndon Johnson’s political decisions were poorly conceived, frequently contradictory, and ultimately self-defeating.

In a previous volume, Planning a Tragedy, I focused on Lyndon Johnson’s decision of July 1965 that Americanized the war. Johnson had believed that losing Vietnam in the summer of 1965 would have wrecked his plans for a Great Society. The president then had used his legislative talents to forge a marginal political and military consensus; in order to avoid a divisive national debate on the American commitment to Vietnam, the president had decided not to mobilize the Reserves, not to request a general tax increase for 1966, and not to publicize the anticipated manpower needs that would be necessary to accomplish U.S. objectives in Vietnam. This guns-and-butter decision, which simultaneously armed soldiers for Vietnam and provided U.S. citizens with the Great Society programs, was tantamount to slow political suicide.

By October 1967, Lyndon Johnson was fighting for his political life: proposing and lobbying for a tax increase to fight a war in Southeast Asia and to send children to school in America. On November 18, 1967, the president privately warned congressional leaders, “If we don’t act soon, we will wreck the Republic.” This bankruptcy in political credibility was evident in Johnson’s personal anguish during the riots that ravaged American cities in the summer of 1967. When he learned that federal troops were to be issued live ammunition in an effort to restore order in Detroit, the president lamented, “I am concerned about the charge that we cannot kill enough people in Vietnam, so we go out and shoot civilians in Detroit.”²

This book reveals how the president and his principal advisors faced the failure of their military policy in Vietnam. The promised “light at the end of the tunnel” in Vietnam—the point at which North Vietnam would seek peace negotiations—was to be achieved primarily by winning a war of attrition by inflicting losses on the enemy forces at a rate that exceeded their ability to recruit additional forces. Johnson and his advisors expected the enemy to seek negotiations when this crossover point was reached. The Johnson administration became fixated on statistically demonstrating to the press and public progress in a war with an uncertain finish line. Kill-ratios, body counts, defectors, order of battle, weapons-loss ratios, bombing, pacification, died-of-wounds, and population-control data were measured, averaged, and manipulated, allowing the United States government to maintain publicly that the war was being won.

Attrition is often referred to as “the American way of war” because it relies on our superior technology. But it did not account for the extraordinary price North Vietnam was willing to pay. No one in Johnson’s administration really knew when the breaking point in the enemy’s will to fight would be reached or how much punishment the Communists would accept before they sought negotiations. By mid-1967 Lyndon Johnson’s worst fears were realized when the press raised for public debate the possibility that the war had become a stalemate. If progress in Vietnam had meant winning, stalemate was the equivalent of losing. The fragile political consensus for building a Great Society at home and defending freedom in Vietnam collapsed under the strains of Lyndon Johnson’s credibility gap. As the war became stalemated, the president lost support from both hawks and doves who saw no benefit in the president’s policy. A majority of Americans no longer trusted their president.

An important caveat on the nature of primary source materials from the presidential archives. The historical record on Vietnam can seem as bewildering and contradictory as the war itself had been. The documents often contradict the recollections of principal foreign policy advisors who have become quite adept at inventing a history that never was or giving interviews that are of considerably less value than the recollections of amnesia victims.

Nine years after his oral-history interview for the Johnson Library, former presidential assistant William Blackburn attached the following postscript to his original interview: “I unfortunately display a rather cavalier attitude toward our involvement, and while I think that that is more superficial than my views at the time, I must admit to having formed that attitude while working in the highly, and obviously biased, atmosphere of the White House. During the following decade, I have been influenced by discussions, pro and con, over our involvement in Viet Nam, and by the revelation of facts unknown to me, and to most of my associates at the White House, during the period of 1967 and 1968. . . . Unquestionably, one of the aspects of this ‘Greek tragedy’ was the assumption that our people, our political climate, and our economy could sustain both a full commitment in Viet Nam and the unparalleled commitment to social problems proposed by the Johnson Administration. These difficulties, combined with the moral questions raised by the many citizens who were concerned over the war, especially by a new breed of young people with whom we in the Administration had no dialogue, inevitably led to dis-illusionment and discord.”

The recently declassified primary-source materials researched in Lyndon Johnson’s War include presidential staff assistant and deputy press secretary Tom Johnson’s notes from the regular Tuesday luncheons of the principal advisors, as well as other foreign-policy meetings; the weekly cables of Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker to the president; General William Westmoreland’s private command history notes; intelligence data declassified in conjunction with the CBS-Westmoreland libel trial; and materials from the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library, which include National Security Council histories, the Vietnam country file, meeting notes, and memos to the president. As a consequence of this rich reservoir of material, I have reprinted, whenever possible, the world as seen by those who shaped policy between 1967 and 1968. Readers will find exact quotes (grammatical and spelling errors included) from recently declassified files because I believe that the contradictions in logical thinking made by those in leadership positions ought to be digested without an intermediary. I give you their ink from this watershed period and leave the gift of revisionism to those who shape history.

Acknowledgements

In the span of five years I have incurred many debts which I now acknowledge with gratitude.

At the University of California-Davis I benefitted from the work of several undergraduate research assistants—Dana Callihan, Arthur Combs, Susan Fanelli, Paul Fife, Scott Hill, William Lewis, Liang Tan, Laura Weir, and Diane Yapundich. During the final weeks of the project Stephen McHugh energetically tracked down missing footnotes as well as missing pieces of history. Two graduate-student research assistants provided indispensable service. Paul Hahn organized my CBS-Westmoreland archive and Linda Norman distilled over one hundred oral-history interviews.

Two colleagues at Davis, John Freeman and Bruce Jentleson, endured my queries for clarifying the historical record. Alan Olmstead, director of the Institute of Governmental Affairs, committed his resources and friendship to the project. M. A. Farber, who covered the CBS-Westmoreland trial for the New York Times, helped clarify the issues relating to order of battle.

At the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library I was assisted by archivist David Humphrey who helped navigate me through the documents. I also want to thank Claudia Anderson, Mike Gillette, Ted Gittinger, Linda Hanson, Tina Lawson, Director Harry Middleton, E. Philip Scott, Nancy Smith, Bob Tissing, and Frank Wolfe of the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library. I received generous support from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and a travel grant from the. Lyndon Baines Johnson Foundation.

My publisher, Donald Lamm, president of W. W. Norton has been a model for what any author might need of a publisher. His reading and detailed comments of the draft provided a cogent perspective. Questions of style and clarification of substance were resolved by Margie Brassil’s skillful copyediting.

In preparation of the manuscript I was assisted by a staff at Davis that included Micki Eagle, Pat Johnson, Kathi Miller, and Brenda Peterson. I especially want to thank Eunice Carlson for typing several iterations of the manuscript. Linda Potoski and Pat Richell then completed the task.

Several friends who served in Vietnam, Donald Beeler, Michael Handley, Gary Loveridge, Pete Klemik, and Phil Carmona took time to remind me that Vietnam had been more than the decisions made in Washington. I also want to thank the many Vietnamese students at Davis who have spoken with me about my work and their lives. Most of these young people were forced to flee Saigon in 1975, and they have asked me the hardest questions about the war and our country’s commitment. Most were born after the Tet offensive of 1968, after Lyndon Johnson’s war.

Thanks also to the Schilling family for making Osprey Cove, their Pacific Coast home, available to me. The extraordinary view and environs rejuvenated, indeed inspired, this weary author.

My family, Janet, Scott, and Lindsay were of great help in providing the proper perspective and diversions. As always I drew strength from their support and encouragement.

This book is dedicated to the generation of young people whose lives were touched by Vietnam.

Abbreviations and Acronyms