Okay, let's start out with this. You okay, Joe?

Yup.

The media coverage of the '64 campaign.

In 1964 Goldwater made it very easy for Lyndon Johnson to look like a dove, because Goldwater took a lot of hawkish positions, which led to one of the more interesting lines of that uh right after the election when it became apparent that Johnson was, in fact, going to go more deeply into Vietnam.

Uh, William F. Buckley, Jr., the columnist, uh a Goldwater supporter, was able to say, which he did often, "They said if I supported Barry Goldwater the war in Vietnam would be escalated. I supported Barry Goldwater, and the war in Vietnam was escalated." So that we had, all of us, the feeling that Johnson was more prudent in terms of war and peace uh, than Goldwater. And I think that allowed Johnson to disguise what probably was in his mind uh, which was an intent to escalate.

But how do you explain that the media at that stage, when you talk the way the media generally went along with the President?

In 1964 and early 1965, the country was going along with the President. The uh, arguments were being made increasingly to the country and through the media uh, that Vietnam was important, that the United States had a commitment there, uh that something would have to be done. Various themes were coming out.

I remember it as a White House correspondent, which I was in, in the early months of 1965. And I think along about February, George Reedy, the Press Secretary, got into a very involved explanation of the rules of American patrolling in Vietnam. Uh, I can't remember the exact words, but it was one of those complicated formulations and if you really worked it all out as carefully as you could, you found that Americans were allowed to go out and patrol aggressively.

And I remember after that briefing going out and standing on the White House lawn with those big wonderful trees, and it was uh it was a foggy, hazy Washington morning in February. And I remember having in my mind the thought that, "My God, I hope Johnson is right. I hope we're not getting into something here that the country can't handle." And I would say that was February of 1965.

Why didn't that reflect itself in the media coverage more quickly than it did? Because I think to a great extent the press in the United States doesn't lead the people. I think it shares national experiences with the people.

When we go back and we look at, at how the press handles um various personalities, Nixon who is regarded as someone maybe brought down by the press according to some of the critics, had an excellent press when he started. Uh, I remember writing that his first press conference as a, as a President was just a terrific performance, and we all liked him!

Uh, Eisenhower, who was terribly popular in the country, was popular with the press. The same was true with Kennedy. And so I don't think that the press led in those early days in Vietnam, and actually if you go back over it, I'm not sure the press led at any stage of the process.

Let's come out for a moment to the way Johnson dealt with the media. First, the way he set the agenda and then how he dealt with you all personally, if you can recall some personal anecdotes about sending him a conference to pick up. In other words having personal meetings with him.

Well, Johnson was...Johnson was ill at ease with the press, and in private I learned this when I got into the government - I didn't know it when I was a reporter - would...rage against certain reporters who were writing things out of Vietnam that he didn't like, that he didn't think were supportive of the aims of the war. Uh, and while I think that's true of any administration, Lyndon Johnson brought an added dimension to anything that he ever did, and so his rage was larger, I think, than many other Presidents.

In public...what we saw with Johnson, those of us who met with him in those days and he was an accessible President, uh, was the uh, uh terribly persuasive man on the basic issues as he saw them in Vietnam - defending Vietnam against aggression uh, uh following the, the themes of Munich uh, of resisting aggression of the uh, requirements for the uh, United States to be strong. And it wasn't I think until later that we really began to learn about his difficulties in communicating.

He was very good at communicating when you were alone with him. He was a master at that. He was quite good in groups up to about ten or fifteen. Beyond that he always had difficulties. And what he wanted to do with the media in the United States, Lyndon Johnson, was he wanted to command it the way he commanded the US Senate when he was majority leader.

You see, Lyndon Johnson was not so much a politician, in my view, as a parliamentarian. He was a man who had learned in the Congress of the United Sates to build coalitions, to put together blocs so that things could be accomplished. And when he got downtown to the White House and had to lead the country through rhetoric, persuasion, using the media for that he became terribly frustrated.

Jack Valenti, who worked for him then, will tell you that one of the things that Johnson wanted was instant access to the television networks. Therefore, in the basement of the White House was erected, put together, a control room, a regular network control room with the required buttons for putting the President on the air in a hurry.

And uh, and then Johnson occasionally back in there, and I don't have the record in front of me, as as bored housewives were sitting at home dazed by soap operas suddenly Bang!, there would be Lyndon Johnson, you see, in the middle of the afternoon saying, "You've got to believe me!" that was the real message, "Believe me. Trust me. Love me." He wanted everybody to love him.

And so until he died he had that same sense of frustration because he couldn't do with the media in the United States, with the mass media and, therefore, the people of the United States, what he had done with the members of the US Senate.

But it did work for him at the beginning. He was persuading media work, wasn't he?

At the beginning of the war aims, I think, along with President Johnson were persuading the country and the media that what was going on in Vietnam, although risky, was probably worthwhile.

Given to the way he, his understanding, his understanding of the way the media worked, especially where television worked, uh, did you get some sense of the way he chose the times? For example, if he wanted to make an unpopular statement he'd do it at mid-day, if he wanted to say something, he'd use prime time. How well did they understand the techniques of television? I'm thinking particularly about the July 28th "Why Vietnam" speech which he gives...

When did he give that? Was that on prime time?

No, at noon. It was a mid-day press conference.

Well, that's... By 1965, the networks had gone to half hour evening news programs. Uh, the Johnson White House knew that if you uh, wanted to get on television there were various ways of doing it. If you wanted to guarantee that you were on the uh, evening news, uh you did it up until about, whatever you did, up until about 4:00 in the afternoon. That would guarantee you an appearance on the news if it was at all news worthy, uh in an edited form.

And very often uh, this happens today, a Presidential statement will be made late in the afternoon in the sure knowledge that the uh, the early evening newscasts will pick it up and carry it. Uh, the use of prime time by Lyndon Johnson, I think probably had not been used before as much as it was by Johnson. And again there was his sense that uh, if he had something positive and really good to say, he wanted to say it when most people were watching.

Uhm, this is always an area of uh, some tension between the networks and the President. Because he can, in fact, can command time uh, when he thinks it's something in the national interest. The networks have to judge whether it, it's more political than in the national interest. And Johnson I think probably was one of the early users of the prime time press conference uh, to explain and to get his views across.

What about, can you recall some observations or experiences in watching the way he could preempt other things, and I'm referring specifically like when Fulbright would hold a hearing which was critical of the war, he could rush in some way and grab the spotlight away?

Lyndon Johnson was, really thought of himself as his own press secretary. He had several press secretaries during his uh time in the White House - George Reedy, Bill Moyers, George Christian. And yet what he did was he, he really ran himself as far as appearances were concerned.

Now you have to remember that Lyndon Johnson was one of the great news junkies of all time. Uh, Frank Stanton had given him a console with three television sets. Uh, some of us who were covering the White House in those days would be allowed into the Presidential presence say at 11:00 at night. There would Johnson be naked, face down on a rubbing table with somebody giving him a back rub, watching intently three sets for the 11:00 news. In his, in the oval office...

We're out of film. Oh, we've got to get that story. Sorry.

You see, Lyndon Johnson was one of the great news junkies of all time! Uh, Frank Stanton had given him a console with three television sets on it so he could watch three networks at a time. (Coughing) Let me start that again cause I've got a frog in my throat.

Say who Frank Stanton was.

Why don't I say somebody.

Okay.

Lyndon Johnson was one of the great news junkies of all time. Somebody had given him a console on which sat three television sets so he could watch three networks. And sometimes when we were covering the White House we would be allowed to go and call on the President at 11:00 in the evening. And we would go into his bedroom and find him stark naked face down on a rubbing table getting a back rub watching three news programs simultaneously.

In his office he, uh I suppose a year or so after he was elected President in 1965, he had three wire service ticker machines put in the Oval Office! That's a national monument! And this big ugly cabinet stood there with these three machines making a big racket!

And he kept up with the news with the same kind of intensity that let's say the news editor of the New York Times does. But, I don't think that he ever understood how the press works in the United States. He understood and he knew individual reporters very well. He was terribly persuasive with some of them. Some of them would pretty much write what Lyndon Johnson wanted them to write. Others wouldn't.

But, when it came to the organization of the press of "Why is, what is Mrs. Graham like at the Washington Post? How can I get something out of Punch Sulzberger at the New York Times? Who are these mysterious people at Time Magazine and what are they doing to me?" There was a, there was a kind of a paranoia about the organizations. Although as well as any politician in the United States, he courted the press individually.

Did you think that or feel that when you're on a one on one situation with the President that you are feeling the power of the Presidency? I mean was he using that to maximum dealing individually?

Johnson was... Sometimes President Johnson was shameless in his use of the Office. Uh and I think many people remember him saying, "I'm the only President you've got." Uh, thereby invoking in a lot of us in the press and in the public a kind of respect which maybe we shouldn't give slavishly to Presidents.

(cough) I'm trying to think of how to put this, but... when any reporter goes in to see the President personally, whether it's upstairs in the family quarters or it's in the Oval Office or, as Johnson always used to do, in a little tiny office next to the Oval Office, sitting there with the President of the United States is for any person a special experience. And uh, and I think for young reporters it's particularly special uh, uh experience and you're very respectful.

I think the President has an enormous advantage when he has you into the White House and talks to you. And Johnson, I think, was quite good at that, talking to people individually. But the larger issues is what he had trouble with.

Let's go for a moment into your period when you were in government - VOA. Did you get a sense of Johnson trying to organize a campaign on Vietnam - the "Why Vietnam" films. I mean there was a whole sort of almost propaganda campaign on his part. Do you recall any of that?

When I went into the government to run The Voice of America in uh in June, I guess, of 1965, um I knew I was getting in...into a propaganda organization - that's what The Voice is. And uh, and I went in unwillingly. My arm twisted and nearly broken by Lyndon Johnson. Uh, I found when I got inside, however, that at The Voice of America the newscasts were pretty straight about the war. Uh, I mean not just pretty straight, uh, and they were accurate newscasts.

We used to have a phrase you'd hear around the halls of The Voice occasionally called "selling the salami." And that was uh, American policy put as persuasively as it could, which we did in the, in the commentaries. The USIA was geared up to produce films about the war, to produce radio documentaries at The Voice about the war, to use all of its various establishments to to promote American involvement in the war.

But, when I was at The Voice it was not politicized uh in the sense that we would say sneak things into the news that weren't true. Uh, and we did most of our work in the commentaries. Now, (bell ringing, cough)... I'll wait till that's over.

Commentaries, which we produced at The Voice uh, in a lot, in forty-five languages or whatever it was, uh were a little more difficult about Vietnam. Because what you were trying to do was to explain the American involvement there in terms that would be understandable to people of different cultures around the world. And it wasn't easy!

For example, there are a number of Vietnamese dialects, and we were broadcasting in those dialects. And one day I asked one of our Vietnamese language people how they defined freedom, cause I was very interested. We would write a commentary in English, give it to them, they would translate it. Well, freedom was a word that was really probably overused in those days because it was such an important element of American policy or at least the stated aims of American policy.

So I asked this fella who spoke Vietnamese how they handled freedom. And he said, "Well, I'm sorry to report there is no word in the Vietnamese language for freedom." I said, "You are kidding! This is impossible! There has to be a word for freedom in the Vietnamese language!" He said, "I'm sorry sir, there isn't." So we looked into that pretty carefully. There is a word uh, that they use that's close to it. But it means license. And I don't use the word "license" in the good sense, I use it in the bad sense. And the word you'll be interested to learn is "tự do."

And when I heard that I remembered the street with all the bordellos in Saigon which is called "tự do." It means license. Therefore, what we had to do at The Voice was to use the most convoluted possible language you could imagine to explain the simple concept of freedom! And it was very difficult to do. And I always think back on that as one of the, there are a lot of problems about Vietnam, but that's one that sticks in my mind. We were trying to explain the concept of freedom to people who didn't have the word in their language.

Let's go on to the late 1967 and media at this stage beginning to change, beginning to be more skeptical, beginning to cover antiwar demonstrations. I wonder if you could get into that?

I think in order to understand the...the way television covered dissent in the late 1960's in this country you have to think back to how television - a fairly new journalistic medium - went through the learning process about itself. During the 1950's - black and white television, 15 minute network newscasts - people who wanted to get their point across through demonstrations learned that if they showed up at certain places the cameras would be there and they'd get on television and wasn't that terrific! An awful lot of blacks understood that right away...in the 50's.

By the 1960's, I think it, television people - cameramen, editors, producers, correspondents - had become much more sophisticated about being manipulated by the, by the press. And so that, by demonstrators. So that by 1967, I was by then back working for NBC - we knew very well how to avoid being manipulated. The interesting thing was that the size of the protest against the war became so large that it was impossible to avoid it as a news story.

A lot of people say we were manipulated by that. I don't think so. We had learned to to, um to avoid manipulation and we were simply responding to masses and masses of people. If you think of the 1968 Democratic Convention...uh and the fighting on Michigan Avenue in Chicago between hundreds and hundreds, perhaps thousands of demonstrators, it was a story of inescapable news value. It had to be covered!

And I remember Walter Meres of the Associated Press writing a lead the night that Hubert Humphrey received the Democratic nomination at that convention and he wrote something like "...Hubert Humphrey, a man of peace, received the Democratic nomination tonight under armed guard." And it tells you a lot about the times we were living through then, and television I will defend as doing the journalistic job it should have done. By then opposition to the war was huge and very well organized.

But then you get into the whole question of the feedback sense that the demonstrators are out there performing for the cameras and that this is the obligation that they'll be standing around on the street corner, along come the cameras and they go into action.

Let's cut a second. We're almost out of film.

I can deal with that. Ask me that question when we start again.

Okay?

I suppose there's always a question as to how...dissenters within a society are able to use the, the media in a society. Uh, I suppose before it became popular to be against the war in the United States there were a lot of demonstrations, a lot of manifestations of dissent that got on television. And you ask yourself why did they get on television?

Well, in I suppose while I never read the polls to decide what's news, and it would be fatal to make the news follow the polls - everybody would fall asleep after about six months. Uh, the, nevertheless it was, there was a legitimate amount of dissent - let's say twenty-five percent, thirty percent against the war. Um, and so I think out of a sense of uh, what's news uh, and out of a sense of fairness to different groups uh, a lot of these things got on television.

Now, ask yourself the question what's news? It's hard to answer. I suppose our rule, my rule is that news is a chronicle of conflict and change. And if you think about those two words in the context of the building opposition to the Vietnam War and the story of the war itself, we had an awful lot of conflict and we had growing change. And I think to that degree we were justified in covering the dissent in the United States.

Now, did television and the press, in general, cause any of that dissent? Legitimize that dissent? Increase that dissent? I think to some degree it did, but what I do think, and I think I learned this first in television in the 1950's when we had a great social change in terms of blacks and whites in the United States, that what television does is it doesn't initiate social change. It doesn't create social change. But it amplifies and accelerates (cough) change again - I'm sorry.

What I began to learn, and I think we all began to learn in the 1950's in terms of relations between blacks and whites in the United States that television doesn't invent social change or create social change. But what television does is it amplifies and accelerates social change. We have to learn to live with that as a society.

If there's an idea who's time has come, television will make it develop and, and grow to fruition more quickly than would have happened before television. That's what I think happened with dissent and the Vietnam War. It was there, and it was legitimate dissent, and television I think made it grow more quickly and made it more socially powerful than had there been no television.

Let's go on to the handling of the war itself, with battle scenes coming in and the decisions. What dictated what battle scenes were used or what horrendous scenes might be used on television? What was it?

For a television news program like the Huntley Brinkley Report the, the coverage of the Vietnam War was a very complicated process. We tried for several years when the American involvement grew to hundreds of thousands of troops and there were main force battles, to try to uh, cover battles instead of just single operations; instead of going north one day, south the next, west the next, and east after that we tried to see if we could bring more coherence to the coverage by staying with individual battles.

That was very complicated, keeping the viewers reminded that this was the second or third day of a battle, uh of trying to cover it I suppose the way uh we would have covered World War II if there had been television. Trying to bring some sense out of, out of what was noise. And it was awfully hard to do.

One of the problems with that war, scattered as it was all over a wide territory with sudden and unexpected actions, was that that there really wasn't any coherence to the war as far as a journalist was concerned. Things were springing up in front of you, behind you, back of you. And so for television, with its uh more cumbersome equipment - camera crews - ah it was a tough war to cover.

Therefore, I think probably, that a lot of the coverage was...part of a mosaic of some kind. That if you looked at the whole mosaic, you could find out what was going on in Vietnam. But if you looked at any of the individual pieces, which would say represent a story on Nightly News one night, it was very hard to draw any larger conclusions. I think we told the story in the long run. But I would hate for history to depend on a random choice of any one night or any one week on any one network program for an understanding of the war in Vietnam.

Just to refine this point for the moment, is the decision of what film you were using...how were those decisions made? Was it made on the basis of a drama of that film, or how news or how coverage dictates news?

The decision to use uh blood and gore uh, was always a difficult one. Uh, and an awful lot of the blood and gore of the Vietnam War ended up on the cutting room floor. I mean I used to say to people and they used to say to me, "You're working on a program that's seen in people's homes at dinner time. Children are watching. Uh, be careful." And so we were extremely careful about it. There were some notable exceptions. The shooting of General Loan in, on a Saigon street.

Sorry, the shooting by General Loan.

Uh, oh geez, I'm sorry. Uh, there, there were some notable exceptions - the shooting of a prisoner by General Loan in a Saigon street. The picture of the little girl running down the road naked with napalm burns I thought had an extraordinary effect! Uh, but by and large what I think you saw out of Vietnam was uh...random pictures.

If we got pictures of...not violence exactly, but I guess you'd have to say violence with purpose. Violence that proved something. Violence in, in the fighting in Hue, which showed how strong the enemy forces may have been. Fighting in the streets of Saigon during Tet. Uh, those kinds of things which were brutal, they were awful images. But, I think they helped tell the story. They were part of the story.

There probably was also a certain amount of just gratuitous violence that made it way, made its way onto television, into the newspapers, into the magazines. Journalism is a, an uncertain tool. It is not always precise. I think sometimes it should regret what it does. And so I would say, yes. There was a percentage of gratuitous violence that made its way on the screens.

I want to jump ahead now into the, after the Chicago Convention beginning with the Nixon Administration. The Peace Talks had begun. The silent majority speech has been made. You begin to sense the shift of emphasis. Now you gonna, more caution on the part of the television coverage.

I don't know what that means, more caution. Uh, the war itself was beginning to uh wind down um...toward the end. And I think that it became a different kind of, of um, of coverage problem. You had the Peace Talks in Paris; uh you had the uh the war in Vietnam; you had the bombing of Hanoi; you had uh...the war seemed to change - the story, excuse me - the story seemed to change in character.

And I don't know whether it was because editors...producers thought it was drawing to an end. I do know that the things like the bombing of Hanoi, uh Peace Talks and uh certainly the final days in Saigon uh were of a different order. They were a different kind of quality of news story. I don't think I'm making any sense, but I'm...

Let's cut here. This is beginning to get a little complicated. I suppose what I'm saying is...

Is it November '61?

Okay, John.

You see, there was a difference I think between the Johnson and Nixon Administrations in terms of their relations with the press. Johnson was so preoccupied with Vietnam that uh, and so devoured by Vietnam, that uh, pretty much that subject dominated his relations with the press. But when Nixon became President the attitude toward the press grew at one time more hostile and more generalized.

And when Agnew came out in November, I guess, 1969 with his famous attack on the press it seemed to me that it represented a generalized attack that didn't have all that much to do with support of the war. Uh, Nixon had said that he was going uh to get us out of Vietnam. That was generally accepted. It was certainly hoped by everybody in the press and the public.

So that Agnew was really after us for uh a broader range of reasons which would only include the Vietnam War. Now, after the Agnew attack - I'm a pretty careful reader of the newspapers and, and I was then uh...a contributing editor of the Huntley Brinkley Report - uh, I used to go around saying to people when they would say, "Well, what's your reaction to Agnew?" I would say, "Well," a good journalist when he gets into a serious subject always thinks twice before using certain words, and I said then uh and I believe now that we were thinking thrice. Uh, we were more cautious. I think it did have that effect.

I noticed uh, um things in The Washington Post, for example, after the Agnew speech for a while that uh that seemed not to be currying favor with the Administration but to be to have stories that the Administration certainly wouldn't mind, and picture layouts, and things like that. It didn't really last very long.

Okay John.

So, that after Agnew made that attack on us in Des Moines, um I think there was reaction in the, in the press, a little bit of one. People were always asking me in those days right after the speech, "What's your reaction? Have you changed? Was he effective?" And I would tell them that a good journalist always thinks twice when he has to use a word carefully, and all that, and that I figured I was thinking thrice these day, and I saw that reflected I think in a number of columnists and some newspapers and magazines. But my guess is that that reaction, that extra care, that thinking thrice lasted about six months.

Now, one interesting statistic...when Agnew made his attack on the networks, which my network, NBC, slavishly covered live at 6:00 in the evening - I thought that was an awful mistake - uh, but they put the Vice President on live and he made this slam-bang attack on us, and then we got a lot of telephone calls, and mail and letters and response from the public. And when we added it all up, 50 percent supported the networks and 50 percent supported Agnew. And I suspect that our response was the response that every news organization had.

Some of them were out there and they didn't like what you were saying, and the Vice President got onto that. They tended to be older people. They tended to be people who had grown up, grown to maturity in an age before television. This is an important distinction. Young people who have grown up with television are used to it. They don't mind it! They understand it!

But if you had grown up the way my father had grown up, editing his newspaper at the breakfast table, not reading the stories about the rapes, not bothering with the crime news, uh being his own editor with The Chicago Tribune - he had a wonderful time with the paper and didn't read half of it! If my father had been watching the Huntley Brinkley show in 1968, I think he would have been on Agnew's side. All that horrible stuff! And you only have two ways - you can turn it off or leave it on.

And that's the problem that we had in 1969. The fact is that a lot of people, older people, didn't like what they were seeing. Yet, they didn't want to turn it off. And so those are the ones who went with Agnew. And as I say, our response was about 50 percent against us. Today...I would say that that group is something like 5 percent.

Let me just go back to one...

Let's cut. We've got just a half hour.

One comparison - Johnson versus Nixon. Again, I don't want to put any words in your mouth, but it was a bombastic quality of Johnson's criticism - he would call you a communist and so forth. Did you sense, though, in contrast there was in the Nixon Administration towards the media a kind of viciousness that had not existed, that Johnson being, you know, accepted this as part, didn't like it and so forth. But it was, it was superficial. You know what I mean?

Well, you know a lot of that, Stanley, I don't think we ought to get into that because it's hearsay, and also I think a good deal of the when you talk about the Administration, a lot of that uh came after the Watergate burglary. A lot of the gathering the wagons around the White House and the press is out to get us.

Let's go on to...

Joe, could you cut for a minute please? I just want to try...

You see, the coverage of the Vietnam War...can be described as uh, various stages, various different kinds of coverage. It seems to me that, that one of the denominators of coverage of the Vietnam War were American casualties. That may sound overly simplistic but it obviously had an effect on, on the coverage.

When we were getting casualty figures, weekly casualty figures of 30 and 40 people killed and wounded, it was one kind of a story. A few years later we were getting figures of 500 Americans killed and wounded in Vietnam every week. So you did begin to cover more funerals!

You did begin to cover the uh, uh the, the death of two twin boys, both of whom had died in Vietnam uh, and interview the mother. And uh go to the little town and and uh, do a story on the death in Vietnam of the captain of the football team. It became part of the coverage of the Vietnam War! And it was a very important and understandable part of the coverage of that war.

And I do believe that it...unquestionably moved more quickly the process of dissent in the United States. Was that bad or is it good? Seems to me it's inevitable, neither good nor bad. Uh, more people were getting killed more learned about it. War came closer to them through the deaths uh of those boys and the coffins coming home. And it was on television. It was a legitimate news story.

Okay. I know your time is short so let's just do a wrap of the whole thing, a personal thing, your own perceptions and how they changed. And also how your own perceptions changed, let's say in tune with your colleagues.

You mean in terms of, of my view in terms of support or opposition to the war?

In a way, how your own, the evolution of your own attitudes, your own perceptions of the war could either go from at the beginning, I mean however you want to do it. Not having known very much at the beginning, then learning more. In other words, how would you describe your own change of thinking?

It's very hard for somebody who is my age, 55 years old, to um...let me see if I can find another way of starting that...

You want to break for a second?

No, no. I'll be all right. You see, I think one uh thing that people don't really understand about journalists is that most of us are credulous people. Uh, we believe most of what we're told. And I grew up in an America where you could win arguments in college by saying, "Here are official government statistics." And the government had a legality and a legitimacy and an authority and an aura of the federal government! It was wonderful!

And when we began to get involved in Vietnam...and we began to see the I guess misuse of American resources and American power in Vietnam, and we realized that we got into a bad mistake, it began to shake some of that early confidence that you had in your federal institution. When Lyndon Johnson became...a raving kind of frustrated President, perspiring in his shirtsleeves and so angry about everything, it took a little bit of the aura of the Presidency away from me. I lost something there. I began to lose my innocence.

And then along came Watergate on top of that and I'm afraid that uh...Vietnam was part of that process. You have to look at them both together. Vietnam began the process and then Watergate sort of ended it. So that you came out (cough)... Vietnam began the process...

Begin again.

Vietnam began the process and Watergate sort of ended it. And you came out at the end of these years of trouble and turmoil. One period Vietnam blending into the other of Watergate. And thank God it's over, but it's gonna be a little while before we get all our credulity back and all of our feelings of honor back, and all of our feelings of trust in our institutions.

So I suppose that Vietnam is important in my own life because it...shattered some beliefs that I had about the inevitable rightness of American power. We couldn't have done anything wrong when I was growing and we were later fighting the Second World War. We were terrific in Korea. And there, we, we had God on our side! We were in the right! It was impossible to question the dignity of the United States! And that's what Vietnam did to me.

Can you just repeat that last sentence? It might be better with a closer shot.

No. That's not...no.