Johnson Lyndon B. - Lyndon Johnsons war : the road to stalemate in Vietnam

By the same author

Planning a Tragedy: The Americanization of the War in Vietnam

The New American Presidency

The Office of Management and Budget and the Presidency, 19211979

It hardly seems possible that in a week the Johnson years will be over. I cannot help but think as the end draws near that he was in office at what must have been the most turbulent conjunction of elemental forces since the collisions of the 1850s. How do you judge a Presidents performance when you cannot begin to understand the currents of change and upheaval that engulfed his era? He tried to act as he thought the crises demanded, at a time when no one really knew what the crises were. Perhaps in time it will be said that a lesser, simpler man might have been crushed in the awful sweep of things we have experienced in the last five years. His would have been perplexing years even in a halcyon era, for as Creon said in Oedipus, Natures such as this chiefly torment themselves.

Personal letter from Bill Moyers to Harry McPherson, January 1969

Lyndon Johnsons War

The Road to Stalemate in Vietnam

LARRY BERMAN

W W NORTON & COMPANY NEW YORK LONDON

Copyright 1989 by Larry Berman

All rights reserved.

Printed in the United States of America.

First published as a Norton paperback 1991

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Berman, Larry.

Lyndon Johnsons war: the road to stalemate in Vietnam/Larry Berman.

p. cm.

Includes index.

1. Vietnamese Conflict, 19611975United States. 2. United StatesPolitics and government19631969. 3. Johnson, Lyndon B. (Lyndon Baines), 19081973. I. Title

DS558.B465 1989

959.7043373dc19 88-25360

ISBN 13: 978-0-393-30778-8

ISBN 978-0-393-24253-9 (e-book)

W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110

W. W. Norton & Company Ltd, 10 Coptic Street, London WC1A 1PU

For the Vietnam Generation

This is not Johnsons war. This is Americas 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 Johnsons war. Three weeks later LBJ confided to his principal advisors, I am like the steering wheel of a car without any control.1

Lyndon Johnsons War focuses on the repercussions from President Johnsons 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 Johnsons political decisions were poorly conceived, frequently contradictory, and ultimately self-defeating.

In a previous volume, Planning a Tragedy, I focused on Lyndon Johnsons 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 dont act soon, we will wreck the Republic. This bankruptcy in political credibility was evident in Johnsons 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 Vietnamthe point at which North Vietnam would seek peace negotiationswas 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 Johnsons administration really knew when the breaking point in the enemys will to fight would be reached or how much punishment the Communists would accept before they sought negotiations. By mid-1967 Lyndon Johnsons 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 Johnsons credibility gap. As the war became stalemated, the president lost support from both hawks and doves who saw no benefit in the presidents 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