The Vietnam War stalemate machine

Paul Rosenberg looks at George McGovern and his opposition to the Vietnam War in George McGovern: The road not taken Aljazeera English 10/25/2012.

What particularly caught my attention about this article was a reference he makes to Robert Mann's A Grand Delusion: America's Descent Into Vietnam:

With the release of LBJ's White House tapes, it became clear why McGovern's private entreaties had no effect: LBJ did not need to be convinced that the Vietnam War was bad policy. He already knew and believed that himself, but he believed even more that he'd be impeached if he failed to fight.

Mann's book clearly established the origins of Johnson's thinking: How the Democrat's dramatic -though brief - loss of the Senate in the wake of the Korean War, elevated Johnson to Minority Leader, making him the point man responsible for regaining the majority. There were many more actors than two in Mann's book. But the contrast between these two is most instructive. Both men knew what was right, and both men did what seemed politically expedient for a time.

I haven't read Mann's book yet, so I don't know what may be distinctive about his findings.

But the fact that Presidents, including Johnson, feared very bad political repercussions if they didn't press forward with policies they knew to be bad policy in the larger scheme of things isn't a new analysis. The longest chapter in Daniel Ellsberg 1972 book Papers on The War was titled, "The Quagmire Myth and The Stalemate Machine." There he shows that Presidents from Truman through Johnson made decisions on the Vietnam War that were aimed at preventing immediate military disaster and the bad domestic political repercussions they expected that would involve. He argued in the introduction to the book, quoting a 1969 memo of his own, "that the long-run goal four Presidents [Truman, Ike, JFK, LBJ] had chosen to pursue in Indochina - the permanent exclusion of the Indochinese Communist party from open politics, and ultimately its destruction as an organization - had always been beyond their reach. What was always likely to result from their efforts was what had happened: defeat in the North, stalemate in the South."

Ellsberg discussed six decisive decision-making points:

• Truman's decision in 1950 to subsidize the French colonial war in Indochina
• Eisenhower's choice in 1954 to forego direct American military intervention accompanied by a progressively hardening defense of South Vietnamese strongman Ngô Đình Diệm (0901-1963)
• Kennedy's decision in 1961 to send military advisers to support Diem's South Vietnamese military effort
• Kennedy's ill-fated 1963 decision to back the overthrow of Diem, which resulted in Diem's assassination
• Johnson's decision in 1964 to bomb North Vietnam after the infamous Tonkin Gulf incident
• Johnson's decision in 1965 to undertake massive, continuing bombing and "to accept open-ended ground force commitment" to preserve a non-Communist South Vietnam

As 1950 opened, Mao Zedong's Communists had taken full power in China, with the exception of the island of Taiwan. A full-blown Red Scare was already under way even before Sen. Joseph McCarthy announced his still-undisclosed alleged list of Communists in the State Department in Wheeling, West Virginia, of February 9, 1950. Ellsberg quotes from that speech of the alcoholic Senator who managed to produce a great deal of political malpractice over the next four years, "How can we account for our present situation ulesss we believe that men high in this government are concerting to deliver us to disaster? This must be the product of a great conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous venture in the history of man."

No, that stuff didn't start with Glenn Beck.

McCarthy claimed in a Senate speech of March 30, 1950, "It was not Chinese democracy under Mao that conquered China, as Acheson, Lattimore, Jessup and Hanson contend. Soviet Russia conquered China and an important ally of the conquerors was this small left-wing element in our Department of State." Not matter how slim the probability of "winning," there was little debate within the

McCarthy was sleazier and more dishonest than most. But there was bipartisan consensus on much of this attitude, and not just from Dixiecrats, either. Ellsberg quotes Congressman John F. Kennedy in a speech of January 25, 1949:

Mr. Speaker, over this weekend we have learned the extent of the disaster that has befallen China and the United States. The impressibility for the failure of our foreign policy in the Far East rests squarely with the White House and the Department of State.

The continued insistence that aid would not be forthcoming unless a coalition government with the Communists was formed was a crippling blow to the National Government.

So concerned were our diplomats and their advisers, the Lattimores and the Fairbanks, with the imperfection of the democratic system in China after twenty years of war and the tales of corruption in high places that they lost sight of our tremendous stake in a non-Communist China.

Our policy, in the words of the Premier of the National Government, Sun Fo, of vacillation, uncertainty, and confusion has reaped the whirlwind.

This House must now assume the responsibility of preventing the onrushing tide of Communism from engulfing all of Asia. [my emphasis]

The Kennedys were generally on friendly terms with Joe McCarthy, but that's another story.

Obviously, the ability of foreign policy opinion-makers to inflate threats and scare the hoo-hoo out of themselves and the public also didn't begin with the planes that crashed into the Twin Towers on 09/11/2001. As Ellsberg wrote, "Fear of McCarthy's and McCarthyism's power at the polls may always have been overdrawn, even in 1950-52, and still more3 so today. ... From one point of view, of course, what matters in explaining the behavior of Congressmen and officials is what they believe their risks to be, and what risks they are willing to take." On the other hand, looking at things from the perspective of 2012 when the Republican Party sounds more every day like the White Citizens Council circa 1960, it would be hard to say that those fears were entirely irrational.

This was the ugly, panicky, poisoned political context in which the Truman Administration decided to extend $10 million of aid to South Vietnam in May, 1950, at a time when $10 million was serious money. Ellberg wrote:

No matter how slim the probability of "winning," there was little debate within the government as to whether the open-ended direct aid policy we commenced in May, 1950, with a first installment of $10 million, was worthwhile. It could - and did - buy a stalemate; and the alternative was to add the Democrats' "loss" of Indochina to their "loss" of China. that was enough to know. To postpone the loss of Tonkin [Vietnam] beyond the tenure of the Truman Administration evidently seemed worth more than the several billion dollars - and the French and Vietnamese lives - that it cost. [my emphasis]

As an example from the Kennedy Administration, he cites a much quoted article by Kenneth O'Donnell, "LJB and the Kennedys" from Life magazine 08/07/1970. It is usually referenced in connection with Kennedy's second-term intentions with regard to Vietnam. But Ellsberg cites it in the context of Kennedy's judgment of the McCarthyist political danger he perceived was involved:

The President told Mansfield that he had been having serious second thoughts about [Sen. Mike] Mansfield's argument and that he now agreed with the Senator's thinking on the need for a complete military withdrawal from Vietnam.

"But I can't do it until 1965-after I'm reelected," Kennedy told Mansfield.

President Kennedy felt, and Mansfield agreed with him, that if he announced a total withdrawal of American military personnel from Vietnam before the 1964 election, there would be a wild conservative outcry against returning him to the Presidency for a second term.

After Mansfield left the office, the President told me that he had made up his mind that after his reelection he would take the risk of unpopularity and make a complete withdrawal of American forces from Vietnam. "In 1965, I'll be damned everywhere as a Communist appeaser. But I don't care. If I tried to pull out completely now, we would have another Joe McCarthy red scare on our hands, but I can do it after I'm reelected. So we had better make damned sure that I am reelected." [my emphasis]

Kennedy had a more realistic-minded view on foreign policy than he had shown as a Congressman in 1949. As Ellsberg noted, "Mansfield was subsequently quoted in interviews as confirming in substance this report."

Ellsberg didn't elaborate as much on what Johnson's particular political fears were on the Vietnam War. But he made it clear that he saw LBJ continuing the previous pattern:

In brief: A decade before what [Arthur] Schlesinger[, Jr.] calls Kennedy's "low-level crisis" in South Vietnam, the right wing of the Republican Party tattooed on the skins of politicians and bureaucrats alike some vivid impression of what could happen to a liberal administration that chanced to be in office the day a red flag rose over Saigon. ...

Many of the paradoxical features of U.S. escalating decisions as seen from the inside - the "discrepancies" between chosen policies, on the one hand, and internal predictions, recommendations, and long-term aims on the other - can thus be seen to reflect conflict between domestic political requirements on outcomes and domestic political constraints on means.

He adds in a footnote that he is "not saying that only calculations of domestic political interest enter or determine these decisions; nor would I deny that such calculations, themselves, may reflect class or corporate interests."

I should add here that Ellsberg's chapter that I've been citing is, from a poli-sci geek viewpoint, a brilliant piece of analysis, not only of the Vietnam-related decision-making itself but also of the institutional pressures for just-good-enough solutions to difficult problems. I'm impressed with that every time I go back to it.

In Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream (1976), Doris Kearns [Goodwin] quotes from what she represents as verbatim notes of his extensive post-Presidential interviews with Johnson on the subject of his domestic political calculations on the Vietnam War:

Oh, I could see it coming all right. History provided too many cases where the sound of the bugle put an immediate end to the hopes and dreams of the best reformers: the Spanish-American War drowned the populist spirit; World War I ended Woodrow Wilson's New Freedom; World War II brought the New Deal to a close. Once the war began, then all those conservatives in the Congress would use it as a weapon against the Great Society. You see, they'd never wanted to help the poor or the Negroes in the first place. But they were having a hard time figuring out how to make their opposition sound noble in a time of great prosperity. But the war. Oh, they'd use it to say they were against my programs, not because they were against the poor-why, they were as generous and as charitable as the best of Americans - but because the war had to come first. First, we had to beat those Godless Communists and then we could worry about the homeless Americans. And the generals. Oh, they'd love the war, too. It's hard to be a military hero without a war. Heroes need battles and bombs and bullets in order to be heroic. That's why I am suspicious of the military. They're always so narrow in their appraisal of everything. They see everything in military terms. Oh, I could see it coming. And I didn't like the smell of it. I didn't like anything about it, but I think the situation in South Vietnam bothered me most. They never seemed able to get themselves together down there. Always fighting with one another. Bad. Bad.

Yet everything I knew about history told me that if I got out of Vietnam and let Ho Chi Minh run through the streets of Saigon, then I'd be doing exactly what Chamberlain did in World War II. I'd be giving a big fat reward to aggression. And I knew that if we let Communist aggression succeed in taking over South Vietnam, there would follow in this country an endless national debate-a mean and destructive debate - that would shatter my Presidency, kill my administration, and damage our democracy. I knew that Harry Truman and Dean Acheson had lost their effectiveness from the day that the Communists took over in China. I believed that the loss of China had played a large role in the rise of Joe McCarthy. And I knew that all these problems, taken together, were chickenshit compared with what might happen if we lost Vietnam.

"For this time there would be Robert Kennedy out in front leading the fight against me, telling everyone that I had betrayed John Kennedy's commitment to South Vietnam. That I had let a democracy fall into the hands of the Communists. That I was a coward. An unmanly man. A man without a spine. Oh, I could see it coming all right. Every night when I fell asleep I would see myself tied to the ground in the middle of a long, open space. In the distance, I could hear the voices of thousands of people. They were all shouting at me and running toward me: 'Coward! Traitor! Weakling!' They kept coming closer. They began throwing stones. At exactly that moment I would generally wake up ... terribly shaken. [my emphasis]

Kearns explained of this passage:

Did Lyndon Johnson believe all this? Yes ... some of the time. Was it true? Some of it; and the rest was not simply pure illusion. For even Johnson's most grotesque exaggerations were always constructed on some fragment of reality, so that they could never be totally disproven by factual evidence or unanswerable logic alone, only by rejecting his judgment for one more reasonable, more consonant with the known facts.

Johnson's description of the nature of the challenge in Vietnam was, of course, a product of his unique personal qualities. But it is important to remember that many others shared this view, although they would not have expressed it with such color or hyperbole. And they, like Johnson, derived their convictions from historical experience. [my emphasis]

Tags: daniel ellsberg, lyndon johnson, vietnam war

Lyndon Johnson, Robert Caro and the Cuban Missile Crisis

Fred Kaplan is the author of The Wizards of Armageddon (1983), an important book that tells the story of the people (mostly men) who John Kenneth Galbraith labelled the "nuclear Jesuits", the grand theories of nuclear strategy like Bernard Brodie, Albert Wohlstetter and, for a while, Daniel Ellsberg. It's a very helpful book in understanding the preventive war strategy applied by the Cheney-Bush Administration in the Iraq War - and on a smaller but significant scale by President Obama in Yemen. Andrew Bacevich explains that connection in The New American Militarism : How Americans Are Seduced by War (2005).

Kaplan takes issue with Robert Caro's treatment in latest volume of his seemingly endless biography of Lyndon Johnson of the most dangerous nuclear confrontation in history to date, the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. Caro's latest volume is title The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Vol. 4: The Passage to Power (2012). Caro has a strong reputation among our star pundits, who are no doubt gratified by the gossipy tidbits he serves up in abundance.

Kaplan apparently shared this admiration until now. In What Robert Caro Got WrongSlate 05/31/2012, he writes that Caro's multi-volume biography "ranks among the towering achievements in literary biography." Even of the latest volume, he says,"it is a terrific read. Caro paints palpable scenes and draws vivid characters."

However, he writes of volume 4, "Caro’s treatment of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis—and of the roles that Johnson and the Kennedy brothers (especially Robert Kennedy) played in the crisis — is, on several levels, simply wrong." A big criticism, about which I'll say more below.

But first, I'm puzzled how Caro's reputation survived vol. 2, Means of Ascent (1990). Kaplan himself notes that it, "while deeply flawed, is a seminal study in corruption." Gary Wills reviewed the book in the New York Review of Books 37/7 (04/26/1990 issue) in a piece called "Monstre Désacré" and noted some of those "deeply flawed" aspects. This part made a big impression on me, from which I took the insight (which may not have been exactly what Wills intended) that biographers of unpleasant characters need to find a way to love their monster:

In 1944 Laurence Olivier began a run as Sergius in Shaw’s Arms and the Man, unsuccessfully. When Tyrone Guthrie came by to see the Shaw play, he asked, “Don’t you love Sergius?” Decidedly not, Olivier answered. “Well, of course, if you can’t love him, you’ll never be any good in him, will you?” Olivier called this the “richest pearl of advice in my life.” Years later he could point to the exact spot outside the theater where he had received this pearl, after which he loved—and played—the hell out of Sergius.

Robert Caro needed a Tyrone Guthrie at some earlier stage of this long run with the life of Lyndon Johnson. "Love that stooge?" Olivier had asked Guthrie; but Sergius is simply a blusterer. It is easy enough, with effort, to love a vain child. Monsters are another matter, and Lyndon Johnson was clearly a monster of ambition, greed, and cruelty. What’s not to loathe?

But it rots the soul to entertain, too long, an unmixed contempt for any human being, even the worst. There is something eerily obsessive about Caro’s stalking of his villain. It is the inverse of gilding the lily, this continual tarring of the blackguard. Johnson’s treatment of his wife was bad enough, one would think, that Caro need not exaggerate it. Yet Caro reserves information where it would partly exonerate, and produces it only when it further incriminates. We are told, early on, how Congressman Johnson flew home to his district on his patron’s corporate airplane while his wife had to drive the long trip with their belongings. Though Caro admits that "Lady Bird disliked flying," he tells us that the principal reason for "this disparity in the Johnsons’ travel arrangements," which proved that "he treated her like the hired help," was Johnson’s parsimony where she was concerned.

That volume covered Johnson's successful 1948 Texas Senate race, in which he defeated former Governor Coke Stevenson. Johnson won a narrow victory with the help of some questionable vote counting, earning him the enduring nickname of Landslide Lyndon.

But while no amount of context can excuse vote fraud, the context was that Texas politics was corrupt as all hell, and Stevenson in at least his gubernatorial campaign seems to have indulged their own share of it. So far as I'm aware, neither of the two campaigns ever had a legal judgment against them on vote fraud, and the Senate accepted Johnson's election as legitimate. Historians, of course, are not restricted to drawing conclusions that have specific legal decisions to support them. Wills concludes, "Indeed, the history of the area suggests that if Johnson had not 'stolen' the vote, Stevenson would have won by just as artificial a majority." This kind of cautionary framing is important for a situation like Texas or Deep South states from roughly 1875-1965. Segregation and white supremacy produced some very deep-seated corruption in politics. Even Caro indicated that his hero Stevenson would have been ready to buy the same votes if he had been able to.

Stevenson was a nasty old fundamentalist and segregationist, but Caro presents him in saintly images. "Though Caro likes to present himself as a simple fact collector on a giant scale, he is actually a mythmaker, and what he gives us in this book is a night-marishly inverted fairy tale, one in which the dragon slays Saint George," Wills wrote. He refers to:

... the idyllic scene of Coke Stevenson’s retirement that ends the book. Married again, adored and adoring, at peace with the land and himself, Stevenson has rescued his humanity from the degrading spectacle Johnson made of Texas politics. One finishes this long volume with the fear, page by page, that Bambi will show up in the final paragraph to lick Coke's cheek.

And Caro leaves out much of the actual larger political context. As Wills observed:

Stevenson's conservatism was not only states'-rights on racial matters but on fiscal ones as well. He took a pay-as-you-go approach to the state’s own budget, and wanted to keep the federal government out. He had always opposed the New Deal—a position Caro seems to prefer to Johnson's inconsistent support for Roosevelt’s programs. But the conflict of 1948 was not just one of campaign techniques. Johnson’s reliance on new means of communication and transportation resembled the "intrusive" technologies that Caro praised in the first volume of this biography, where the New Deal’s rural electrification was concerned.

As all reviewers seem to note, Caro sorts through a vast amount of material in his work, and that will make his long LBJ biography an important reference for a long time to come, I'm sure. But in Means of Ascent, allows his obviously intense dislike for his subject to run wild to the point of distortion by emphasis and omission. Maybe Kaplan's phrase "literary biography" is getting obliguely at a similar point. "Caro paints palpable scenes and draws vivid characters," but his polemical mission may not make those literary portraits as carefully drawn as one should expect in history writing.

I won't try to relate here the various points on which Kaplan shows that Caro has done sloppy work in his treatment of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Kaplan outlines what we know about the crisis this way:

The crisis began when U.S. spy planes detected Soviet ships carrying missiles to Cuba, as well as the construction of missile-launchers at secured sites on the island. At first, JFK and his advisers figured they’d have to bomb the missile sites—until they calculated the complexities and risks, at which point Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara suggested a naval blockade of the island as a way to buy time and give Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev a chance to reverse course. After 13 days of shrewd diplomacy, a deal was struck, and the missiles were withdrawn.

In the 50 years since, the story and the lessons of the crisis have gone through a fascinating evolution.* In the first phase, as reported by JFK’s favored columnists (and formalized in the books by palace guards, speechwriter Ted Sorensen's Kennedy and White House gadfly Arthur Schlesinger’s A Thousand Days), JFK won the confrontation through sheer threat of force. As one of the advisers was quoted as saying, "We went eyeball to eyeball with the Russians—and they blinked." (This quote, like much else in these accounts, was pure fiction.)

In the second phase, starting in 1982, on the 20th anniversary of the crisis, some of JFK’s top advisers—McNamara, Sorensen, national security adviser McGeorge Bundy, and others—confessed, in a article for Time magazine, that Kennedy had made a secret deal: Khrushchev would take the Soviet missiles out of Cuba, and Kennedy, six months later, would take America’s very similar Jupiter missiles out of Turkey. It had always been known that Khrushchev offered such a deal, but the earlier accounts—including Sorensen’s book, and many other books based on it — had reported that Kennedy rejected it. In fact, the advisers now said, Kennedy accepted it, but told both the Russians and the handful of his own advisers whom he let in on the secret never to tell anyone. (The advisers decided to break their silence because they knew the Kennedy Library was about to release the tapes.)

The third phase began in 1987, with the release of the first tape transcripts, which revealed that the advisers had omitted one key fact in their now-it-can-be-told article for Time: They had all vociferously opposed the trade. JFK stood alone on making a deal with the Soviets - and, in the end, was redeemed.

And Kaplan is apprehensive about what this may promise for the projected fifth and final volume:

Volume 5 of Caro’s series will deal mainly with Johnson and Vietnam, and I’m afraid that his treatment of the Cuban missile crisis in Volume 4 sets the stage for more false lessons. My suspicion, inferred from what really happened in those ExComm meetings, is that JFK would have pulled out of Vietnam—or at least would not have escalated so deeply. The lesson isn't that Johnson marked a departure from Kennedy’s men; it’s that, when it came to questions of war and Communism, JFK himself was departing from the views of Kennedy’s men. It would have been good — it might have made a big difference in world history — if Johnson had known that. And, for the life of me, I don’t understand why Robert Caro made the same mistake.

I'm glad to see Kaplan's criticism. Since Caro's biography is so highly regarded among the punditocracy, its sloppiness may perpetuate itself in many iterations.

Tags: cuban missile crisis, fred kaplan, john kennedy, lyndon johnson, robert caro

Moyers on Martin and Lyndon

Bill Moyers discussed Lyndon Johnson and Martin Luther King, Jr., in his
Bill Moyers essay of 01/18/08 on his weekly Journal show. For all his faults, Johnson really cared about the needs of ordinary people. And acted on it. The video includes Johnson's famous "We shall overcome" moment, a phrase from an old hymn that civil rights activists frequently sang in an arrangement by Pete Seeger.



Moyer's conclusion of the essay:

Of course the movement had come first, watered by the blood of so many, championed bravely now by the preacher turned prophet who would himself soon be martyred. But there is no inevitability to history, someone has to seize and turn it. With these words at the right moment — "we shall overcome" — Lyndon Johnson transcended race and color, and history, too — reminding us that a president matters, and so do we.

Tags: bill moyers, civil rights movement, lyndon johnson, martin luther king jr.

The politics of the Vietnam War in 1967

Vice President Hubert Humphrey with President Lyndon Johnson

I'm always leery of historical analogies applied to present policies. That doesn't mean they're all bad. Just that most of them are.

Analogy or not, people inevitably are comparing the Iraq War to the Vietnam War. This is complicated by the fact that our Republican "culture warriors" have an image of their domestic political Enemy (the liberals, the dirty hippies, scary black people, etc.) that derives heavily from rightwing mythology about the 1960s, including about the antiwar movement and the Vietnam War itself.

The print edition of the New York Review of Books for 10/11/07 has some excerpts from Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.'s, diaries for the year 1967 under the title "The Turning Point", focusing on the Vietnam War. During that period, the military brass were sure of "victory" in Vietnam. The antiwar movement in 1967 was growing among the public and Senators like William Fulbright, Robert Kennedy and George McGovern were expressing their skepticism about Lyndon Johnson policy in the war. The practice at that time, to summarize very briefly, was to escalate the number of troops and call periodic bombing pauses to make a show of "peaceful intentions" but actually not believing any serious willingness to negotiate with the enemy was necessary.

Despite the later public impression that no one knew what we were fighting for in Vietnam - an understandable notion in light of the changing official justifications for the war - there was a defined goal in the war: to preserve an independent, non-Communist South Vietnam. As Schlesinger put it in a diary entry of March 11, the generals at that time were persuaded that they could "force a retreat of the regular Hanoi forces back over the 17th parallel and a dissolution of the Viet Cong". (In historical writing now, the Vietcong is often referred to by its official name, the National Liberation Front [NLF], though Vietcong is also still used because that was the term so commonly used by Americans during the war.)

In light of recent Congressional concern over the blaspheming of the divine presence of our Saviour-General David Petraeus, that diary entry is worth quoting at greater length:

The effect of [Bobby Kennedy's] intervention [by publicly encouraging meaningful peace talks], I think, was to make the administration think concretely about the meaning of negotiation - and, having thought about it, they did not like it. Or, to put it more exactly, having thought about it in the context of the military optimism now sweeping Washington, they feel it would be a great mistake. One has the impression that very little would embarrass the administration now more than a peace overture from Hanoi. The military have the bit between their teeth and are confident that they can "win" the war - i.e., that they can force a retreat of the regular Hanoi forces back over the 17th parallel and a dissolution of the Viet Cong. If they are right, LBJ may still pull himself out of this. But if they are wrong - and the Joint Chiefs of Staff are almost always wrong in their military predictions - then we are committed to a steady enlargement of the war; for, if one thing does not break the resistance, the pressure will increase to do something more - to bomb large population centers, harbors, the industrial complex, to strike along the Chinese border, until we force China into the war. (my emphasis)

Shocking, shocking that a supposedly responsible American and leading historian would suggest even in private that our glorious military leaders might be "wrong" about "their military predictions", and this in a time of war!

Of course, they were wrong about their optimistic predictions on the Vietnam War. And some of the generals finding themselves in that position found it convenient to hide behind conservative idolatry of the military and a dishonest stab-in-the-back theory about the war's outcome.

Sadly, the idea of attacking critics of the war generally as unpatriotic hasn't entirely a Republican habit, as Schlesinger observed in his entry for April 27:

We are reaching some sort of crisis on Vietnam. LBJ has evidently decided on a quick and brutal escalation of the war. It was clear in February that he did not wish negotiation until the existing military balance could be turned considerably in our favor; and his clear intention now is to bomb North Vietnam until Hanoi is prepared to sue for peace on terms which will meet Rusk's idea of a satisfactory settlement. More than that, the administration is apparently determined to advance the proposition that dissent is unpatriotic, and has brought General Westmoreland back for this purpose.

He continued in that same entry with an observation about the practical power the American President has to continue a war, even in the face of major Congressional opposition:

The irony is that all of us for years have been defending the presidential prerogative and regarding the Congress as a drag on policy. It is evident now that this delight in a strong presidency was based on the fact that, up to now, all strong presidents in American history have pursued policies of which one has approved. We are now confronted by the anomaly of a strong president using these arguments to pursue a course which, so far as I can see, can lead only to disaster. It is not hard to assert a congressional role; but, given the structure of the American system, it is very hard to see how the Congress can restrain the presidential drive toward the enlargement of the war. Voting against military appropriations is both humanly and politically self-defeating. The only hope is to organize a broad political movement; and even this cannot take effect until, at the very earliest, the 1968 primaries, which may be too late.

I don't read this as a statement of hopelessness on his part. He was just saying that bringing Congress to the point of forcing a change in Vietnam War policy onto the President would require very significant public political pressure.

Here is one case in which I think we need to be careful not to assume a parallel between then and now. The Vietnam War was intensely unpopular among a significant minority in 1967, but it would still be years before that became a distinct majority sentiment. A majority of the public have been opposed to the Iraq War for quite some time now. The fact that the much-publicized appearance of our Saviour-General Petraeus in Washington, blessing us with his personal divine presence, caused hardly a ripple in public opinion on the war is a sign of the level of opposition to this current war. The situation Schlesinger describes in 1967 is not a parallel in that regard.

His observation about the fact that Congress can only be moved to do their job in restraining a President on a destructive course in the war by continued strong public pressure is, unfortunately, all too relevant today.

The numbing effects of war on people's thinking comes out in his April 18 entry describing a meeting of the previous day with Vice President Hubert Humphrey. Humphrey later came to be regarded as what was then called a "Cold War liberal" (at least by critics who wanted to move beyond the Cold War). But up until 1967 or so, Humphrey had been regarded as more of an aggressive, activist liberal, particularly on the civil rights issue. In that entry, Schlesinger writes:

I think I was depressed most of all by the lack of the sense of the concrete human dimension of problems which characterized the old Hubert. Not once in his long discourse on Vietnam did he express any dismay over the human wreckage wrought by the American policy.... This trailing off of humanity is accompanied by an obvious delight in hobnobbing with statesmen - many mentions of the Pope, de Gaulle, [Sarvepalli] Radhakrishnan, etc., etc., etc. (my emphasis)

The courtier is an ever-present feature around the seats of power. Walt Rostow was one of the key advisers on the Vietnam War during the Kennedy and Johnson administration and is widely regarded as a hack. In his diary entry of July 28, he described Rostow's then-resurgent influence on LBJ:

Walt Rostow has suddenly emerged from a long eclipse and is now established as the Pangloss of the White House, telling the President with great authoritativeness all the things the President wants to hear. Everything, according to Walt, is getting better and better; and I can see him when the bombs begin to fall on Washington, assuring LBJ that the deep-running historic tendencies are on our side, that we are turning the corner in Zambia and Tasmania, and that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds. I last saw him at dinner at Jane McBaine's in Washington on June 14. He exuded self-satisfaction with his resurrection and set forth a tedious and misconceived analogy between LBJ and Lincoln, casting the opposition to the war in the role of the Copperheads [pro-Southern Northern Democrats] and saying that, if LBJ only kept up the military momentum, he would be in the clear in another few months. (my emphasis)

As tempting as it is to see this as a parallel to the neocons and their "cakewalk" fantasies, the similarities probably have more to do with the persistence of hackery and flattering the king than anything else.

But also in light of the present-day polemics over the war-loving Trotskyist neoconservatives and "chickenhawks", these two passages from that same diary entry are striking:

The big issue, of course, has been Vietnam. I would say that this period has marked, if not a change in Lyndon Johnson, at least a change in my own perception of him. I had thought until rather recently that the tendency toward a widening of the war represented a triumph of his advisers over his instincts - that the last thing he wanted was American involvement in a ground war in Asia, or, even less, a war with China, and that his dearest hope was a negotiated solution making possible American withdrawal. If this was once his mood, I fear it is so no longer. He would seem to have turned a corner toward the systematic enlargement of the war. Why? I cannot resist the feeling that domestic politics - his precipitous decline in the public opinion polls - constitute a major factor. He once told Dick Goodwin that there was far more chauvinism in the United States than easterners understood, and it now looks as if a course of playing the war to the hilt has recommended itself to him as the best way of reversing the polls and bringing about Democratic gains in November. There may be other, deeper pressures working on him. Dick has hinted that he may have a streak of personal cowardice (as demonstrated in his panic after the murder in Dallas), which may force him into public virility in order to prove something about himself (in the sense that a war hero, like JFK, felt no need to prove himself by invading Cuba after the Bay of Pigs or the missile crisis). ...

The conversation was resumed over the weekend of July 24, which I spent at Ken Galbraith's in Newfane, Vermont, with George McGovern and Seymour Harris. But now I had begun to think for the first time of the possibility of RFK's going for the nomination in 1968. Of course, this is a long time away - and two years would give LBJ plenty of opportunity for all the escalation he seeks and needs. But, assuming he follows the present course without getting into a nuclear war with China, there might be just the possibility of reversing all historical precedent and rejecting the nomination of an incumbent president.

George said that he would be all for it; adding that he thought that LBJ had a "great yellow streak" and might conceivably be bluffed out of trying for renomination, citing his health and the 22nd Amendment as reasons for not running again. This is all remote and unlikely, but a month ago none of us would have thought it worth a moment's consideration. (my emphasis)

Aside from the psychological speculations, it could certainly be argued that Johnson's withdrawal from the 1968 Presidential race is at least partly a confirmation of McGovern's thought that Johnson could be "bluffed" out of the race. Because at the time of his withdrawal, it was by no means a done deal that Gene McCarthy or Bobby Kennedy could have captured the nomination.

In fairness to Johnson, I would also say that he had a genuine concern for the well-being of the country and a real feeling of responsibility about the Vietnam War (however misguided or reprehensible his policies were) that is difficult to even imagine in men like Dick Cheney, George Bush or Rummy.

On biographical matters, I also found this to be a valuable observation about Hubert Humphrey from a March 11 entry:

... Hubert [Humphrey] went on the air on Issues and Answers. We all watched it before lunch at Hickory Hill (except Bobby [Kennedy], who was so irritated and upset by Hubert's performance that, after a few minutes, he went silently away). It was a new and different Hubert - hard-faced, except for some unctuous smiles, and uncharacteristically coarse in his language. His trouble, I fear, is that he cannot say something publicly without deeply believing it privately; and when, as now, he has no choice in his public utterances, he whips up a fervency of private belief. I fear also that Max Kampelman or someone has persuaded him that this is the issue on which he can knock out RFK. His sense of splitting with the liberal community, a probable feeling of guilt over the positions he is taking - all this has made him self-righteous and irascible. (my emphasis)

The trait of being unable to "say something publicly without deeply believing it privately" would be quite a handicap for most politicians!

Tags: arthur schlesinger, george mcgovern, lyndon johnson, robert kennedy, vietnam war