What were Lyndon Johnson’s priorities in the first 100 days and how did Vietnam fit into those priorities?

LBJ’s priorities for his new administration were really set forth by him on the very night, first night of his presidency. Bill Moyers, the late Cliff Carter and I saw with him in his bedroom at the Elms, his residence in Washington, DC, when we had landed from Dallas, from about ah eleven o’clock in the evening til about four in the morning. Eleven o’clock in the evening of November 22nd til four o’clock in the morning, November 23rd. That night he sketched out for us what was to be an undeviating priority for his administration.

Human justice, civil rights, the first time that he, any government would pass a Federal Aid to Education Act, conservation, to get the economy robust; that is, to spring the tax cut from the finance committee, and in short, to revolutionize the social structure in America. For more equality and for more hope for people that at that time had very little hope. Vietnam was a cloud no bigger than a man’s fist on the horizon. He mentioned it only in passing that first evening. He did not give it much attention because in truth it didn’t seem to merit much attention at that time. Keep in mind that on the night that Johnson became president, there were 16,500 soldiers, American fighting men, in Vietnam.

Although they had not actually entered in ahh combat themselves, they were there. But, to Lyndon Johnson his priorities on that very first day of his presidency was to shake America by the throat and revamp the social priorities in this country, beginning with the economy and going through human justice, conservation, education.

What were the domestic political pressures on him as he shaped the strategy for Vietnam? Was he more concerned about the right wing or the left wing or liberals?

The problems that weighed on him as he, as President Johnson shaped his ah political program was the fear that if he, as he used to say, cut and run in Vietnam, he would find himself being assaulted on all sides by conservatives and the republicans in the Senate and the House who would, in turn, as part of that vengeful feeling about cowardice exhibited in Vietnam would have torn asunder the domestic program that, I guess, you’d call it under the canopy of the Great Society.

At all costs Johnson wanted to protect his flank so that he could move ahead in the Great Society, and he realized that ah unless he was able to resolve Vietnam in a way that placated the right wing, his domestic program would be ah tormented beyond all repair.

Did he have any particular concern about the influence of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on the hill?

Ah. Johnson perceived the Joint Chiefs of Staff the way he viewed military men, with skepticism. But, as Johnson used to say about the presidency; I’m the only president you got. He had to say about the Joint Chiefs, they’re the only military I have. Second, he realized that the Joint Chiefs, however viewed casually by the rest of America, were reviewed with veneration and respect by the Republican and the conservatives.

And, so, he, he listened to them. Now, he had no other source from which to receive military information. There was the CIA and then there’s the military. Beyond that, you’ve got journalists and so forth, but he put little stock in what they had to say. So, in a sense, he was ah, he was cabin-cribbed and confined by the fact that the military was the sole source of ah both intelligence and data.

In, in, in the summer of 1964 ah the plans were being made to escalate but ah could you explain why Lyndon Johnson didn’t move faster than he did? He seemed to be vacillating.

Well now, people say plans were made to escalate the war in ’64, that’s not precisely correct. What you have are contingency plans. Even as we speak the military probably in, in the United States today has military plans, contingency plans for invading the, the Sandwich Islands I suppose, so that there’s always a contingency plan. The president was presented several times in ’64 to my certain knowledge recommendations by the Join Chiefs to begin bombing. He rejected those plans. Rejected them, as he told me, that he did not want to escalate the war.

As the war went on in ’64, he was constantly assaulted by the military with the notion that, if we do a little bit more, Mr. President, we can get rid of this thing quickly. It’s a very attractive notion to a president besieged by an ugly squalid little war he wanted no part of, ah, which was threatening the very roots and foundations of his domestic program, and so that is a siren’s call and it’s an enticing call, but he rejected those calls to bombing. I happen to believe that he did not do it because he thought it would hurt the campaign because I think there are many people who might have liked the idea of us sending out our airplanes to do some bombing at the time.

Even though I remember I was with Lyndon Johnson in Manchester, New Hampshire, when he made his now famous speech that we’re not going to send American boys to fight in Asia, and he meant it because he had ah lived under the MacArthur dictum that you can’t win a land war in Asia, and I think he always felt that way, and later on in the discussion with the military, he kept coming back to this premier question. Can Westerners win a jungle war in Asia?

Talking about contingency plans, could you describe how the resolution that later became the Tonkin Gulf Resolution began to take shape?

Yes, I can. I can tell you about the Tonkin Gulf Resolution because foremost in Lyndon Johnson’s mind was what he perceived to be mistakes made by other presidents. In his thirty years in Washington, he had catalogued with computer precision all the presidents that he had served with and the mistakes that they had made, determined that he was not going to make the same mistakes. One of the mistakes he thought Harry Truman made was to be involved in Korea without congressional approval.

Therefore, he determined at some propitious moment that he would bring the Congress in and have them approve whatever the objectives were to be determined to be in Vietnam. And, he said many, many times that if we’re going to continue in Vietnam, I’ve got to have Congressional approval for the general objectives that we set forth. And, he had had as I recall William Bundy, McGeorge Bundy’s brother, working on such a resolution that would be put forward at a moment that he thought he was politically apt. not because he was being Machiavellian or not because he was being deceptive, but one thing Johnson wasn’t going to do is delude himself that if you were going to continue in Vietnam until “a resolution” then you had to have Congress approving, supporting and maintaining the president’s objectives.

What do you think about the comment that the Tonkin Gulf Resolution was a resolution in search of an incident, that the resolution had been done, was drafted beforehand and was waiting for something to trigger?

Well, I, I, I won’t quarrel with that. I think there may be some, I won’t quarrel with the ah notion that the Tonkin Gulf Resolution ah was as some people say ah, ah a resolution waiting for an incident to trigger it. The president was looking for a politically apt moment to present that resolution. I find that intelligent on the part of a president. To find the time to present something that you think would be received most favorably by the people you’re trying to persuade. And, when the Tonkin Gulf Incident came along, Johnson was ready with his resolution, which, if you read it today, is very lucid and clear. The sentences parse, the logic is solid and its intent is crystal clear.

Ah. No ambiguity about that ah Tonkin Gulf Resolution. Therefore, the Congress could vote it up or down and, indeed, out of the some 535 members of Congress only two voted against it. But, it was triggered by an incident and Johnson used that incident to gain Congressional approval. Now, I find that neither unintelligent nor felonious. I find it ah, I find it astute that if you’re going to gain Congressional approval, then you ought to have a reason for submitting your particular resolution.

Going on to the campaign, the ’64 campaign ah in a sense going back to what you said earlier, did he, was he really being candid when he said he wasn’t going to send American troops to Vietnam during that campaign, or what was his mood, how did, what kind of pressures was he feeling from Goldwater at that period?

Well, (sigh) I uh..., the mood of Johnson in 1964, and the truthfulness of his remarks, I’m not going to send American boys to, to fight in Asia have been often debated. I can speak from personal knowledge of both the mood and what I believe to be the president’s intent are number one, keep in mind the last thing that Lyndon Johnson wanted was a war.

Ah. I remember later on in ’65 or ’66 I sent him a quotation from Walter Badgett who was writing about William Pitt and I underlined this passage and sent it to the president. What Badgett said was that, that Pitt was by temperament a humane man who thought war was inhumane and he did not want a French war. He entered it reluctantly and continued it out of necessity. I think that sums up Johnson’s attitude about Vietnam because the war would have destroyed the Great Society and he knew that instinctively. Number two, when he said I’m not going to send American boys to fight in Asia, I don’t think there’s any question but what he meant it.

Excuse me, we're out of film. Just pick up on the, on the...

"His priority really was the Great Society..."

Now, as to whether or not Johnson was honestly telling the truth when he said in New Hampshire and other places in the campaign that he wasn’t going to send American boys to fight in Asia, I don’t think there’s any question but what he meant that. Ah. The minute that he starts exporting American troops to fight in Vietnam, he exposes his Great Society to tragedy and, perhaps, complete disrepair.

Ah. A war would gain him nothing but trouble and when he said that, he earnestly meant it. But, what we have to understand is that you cannot try the men of one age by the standards of another. Today, everything looks so easy to understand. We all have what Edmund Burke called retrospective wisdom, which makes wise men of us all, but at the time Johnson said that, American boys will not fight in Asia, I don’t think he ever meant anything with more vigor and more substance than he did that.

Let’s jump ahead to the, to the summer of 1965 he was, in fact, committing American combat troops to, to Vietnam. How did he see the choices, the options at that particular moment?

(Coughs) Excuse me. I would say that the meetings held by Lyndon Johnson with his advisors both ah in the White House and the State, Treasury and Defense Departments and the Congress, were the most crucial meetings that he held in all of the Vietnam adventure. They began on July 21, 1965 with the return home of General Wheeler and Secretary McNamara from an on-the-spot inspection trip in Vietnam. They ended on July 27, 1965 and on July 28 the president went to the east room of the, of the mansion to hold a press conference in which he disclosed the decisions which emerged from those ah six days of meetings.

His mood was one of anxiety, it was one of frustration and I guess I can sum it up best by saying that one evening, after one of those meetings, I went back into his office with him and his face was drawn, and I remember he put his hands in his ah, over his face, leaned back in his chair and said, “God, we’ve got to find some way to get out of this war. We’ve got to find some way to end it.” It was ah the expression of a normal human being who was at the end of a tether just totally exhausted and frustrated by the s—...the elusiveness of an end to this war.

He examined this question from every side and all those six days, he asked the tough questions. If somebody were agreeing with him, he would take the other side, the devil’s advocate. If somebody were disagreeing with him, then he would pummel this man with questions to see how sturdy was his own reasoning. I remember him turning to Wheeler and he said to him, you’re asking for ah 200,000 more men now, what happens if in two, three, four, years you ask me for 500,000 men? A very prophetic statement. What do you expect me to do? How can I respond to it? What makes you think Ho Chi Minh won’t match us for every man we send in?

And, another time to the group he said, we’ve got two questions that we’ve got to answer. Can Westerners fight a war in Asian jungles and number two, how on earth can we fight a war under the direction of others whose governments topple like bowling pins? He said, now, somebody answer these questions for me. Nobody was able to do it. And, then he asked one of the questions in kind of a resigned air. He turned to McNamara and Rusk and said, Are we starting something? Are we getting into something now that we just can’t get out of? Where we’re going to have no way to extricate ourselves? These questions were asked over and over again. Yet, the alternatives were equally bleak, as I said. Ah. Hindsight makes us all very intelligent but at the time those decisions were being made, how could President Johnson justify a total withdrawal from Vietnam when no man or woman in America could have foreseen whether or not he was making the right decision, because, at that time, ah, nobody didn’t, nobody believed we couldn’t win the war. It was a question of how we would win it. The idea that a few pajama-clad guerrillas could defeat the mightiest power on earth was absurd.

So, if he cut and run, as Johnson would say, how could he remedy the situation by explaining to the American people that he was doing it in their best interest? Number two, how do you turn tail and let agressors run free in the world? We’re facing that problem today. And, the alternatives are very bleak. Therefore, Johnson was listening to the military and when they said a little bit more and we can win it and get rid of it, it was very alluring.

But why didn’t he ah put the country on a war footing. For example, why didn’t he raise taxes to finance the war? Why ah didn’t he, why wasn’t he more open with the public about where he was going?

(Sigh) Why Johnson wasn’t more open with the public and why he didn’t raise taxes and put the country on a war footing ah is open to a lot of debate. What the president told me at one time was that ah first he was not going to collapse his civil rights, human justice, economic plans to have a robust economy, education and the like; the elements that compromise what we call the Great Society, because he believed that was going to be his great legacy to the future. Number two, he hauled in business men by the long ton to the east room, and I was in maybe a dozen of those meetings of the pro-consuls of business all over this country. Heavy and light industry. Retailers, professional men of all kind.

And, I remember, he would constantly say should I raise taxes, and there was very little enthusiasm for raising taxes. Now, you might say, well, sure, businessmen never want their taxes raised, but businessmen also understand inflation, but there was very little enthusiasm for that, but basically, Johnson never went to a war footing because he knew a war footing would destroy perhaps irretrievably, his plans to make this a better and nobler land.

Looking back on that, however, if I could ask you one, to use your retrospective wisdom, ah, wasn’t that the beginning of the inflation that we’re suffering from today?

Well, economists who depend mainly on introspective values and, and ah judgments have said that that was the seed bed of inflation. Possibly it was. Ah. At that time inflation was maybe 1 1/2 percent. It was practically no inflation. I have no doubt it was a seed bed, which doesn’t mean it couldn’t have been stemmed later on, but there was no doubt that adding twelve, fifteen, twenty billion dollars worth of war had an inflationary impact on our economy.

And, Johnson, understood that. But, he was risking and gambling that he could get rid of this war quickly without doing irreparable damage to the great centerpiece of his contribution to the next five generations of America which was this ah new kind of social justice.

Keep rolling. Why didn’t he pursue it more aggressively? I want to get in the fear of WWIII.

Oh yeah. Ah, the question is often raised and it had been raised to me by people in the Nixon Administration and others who said why didn’t Johnson pursue this war more vigorously, and some senators and congressmen said, my God, if you’re going to fight a war, why do you deny victory to your soldiers. Aren’t you doing them an injustice? Yes, I think, there’s something in that. But, every decision has a progeny, has an ancestor and the ancestors to that decision was the specter of World War III.

Johnson hesitated and he did it every day in shoving in his stack as he want to say, carpet bombing, mining of Hai Phong, all the things which were recommended to him by the military, because he was afraid that a whole covey of airplanes going over Hanoi, three or four of them get over the Chinese or Russian border, get lost, drop their bombs or two: mining Hai Phong we’d blow up a Soviet freighter and all of a sudden stealthily, noiselessly, without any warning of any kind you’ve got World War III on your hands. And once you started escalation as Mike Mansfield told the president, escalation breeds escalation. This was a haunting fear that never left him. Like some looming animal that he was in bed with every, every evening. It stayed beside him. World War III.

And, so, he erred on the side of caution. If you look back you say well, they wouldn’t have come into the war, but at the time the decision was being made, you didn’t know that. And, Johnson feared more than he feared anything else in the world that the history books would say here Lyndon Baines Johnson started World War III and destroyed the known world.

I want to get into some of these questions of his mood at certain times, as you recall. Ah. You remember when the, when he got news of the incidents in the Tonkin Gulf, what kind of mood, how did he react to that?

Well, his first reaction was to make sure what the fact...The first reaction of Johnson to the ah Tonkin Gulf Incident was to ah find out what the facts were. Contrary to what a lot of people have written...

Out of film.

Okay. Rolling.

Contrary to what a lot of people have written about the Tonkin Gulf incident, President Johnson and Secretary McNamara both believed the facts were correct. It would have been absurd and insane for a president to take facts which were known to a lot of people and distort them. If Johnson believed he was using erroneous information, he knows it. He’s not the only person that has that information. He understands the Washington leak, and therefore, the idea that he would deliberately use false information is absurd.

What was his, as you recall it, what was his mood when he got that, the news of the incident, the Tonkin Gulf?

Johnson’s mood after hearing about the Tonkin Gulf was the audacity of the North Vietnamese in making such a move. Number two, that we could not let that go unattended by a reprisal. He always believed, and I think justly so, that ah enemies probe your outer limits to find out how much you will absorb without striking back. Ah. And, he determined that he wasn’t going to let this happen as, indeed, that was the mood that he had on the other attacks on our barracks, on the very other thing, the Pleiku incident and others, when there was an overt unusual attack by the enemy. You could not let this lie fallow. It deserved prompt reprisal.

Could you go on to talk about the, his reaction to the Pleiku incident, the Pleiku attack?

Well, I think his reaction was the same as the, the reaction of Lyndon Johnson to the Pleiku attack, as the other attacks that happened intermittently before the war really began in earnest was that any time that the US is humiliated or assaulted, the United States could not turn the other cheek. It had to make a strong and visible reprisal to let the enemy know that this was not going to be won on the cheap. And, there was a modest amount of anger, but mainly there was a little bit of steel in his spine. A resolution that attack begets reprisal and ah I think this was, was what he felt was the proper response of the United States to a number of these incidents as we are now wont to call them.

Were you there when the Marines went in? This was before the big troop buildup in March of 1965. do you recall his mood when those first Marines went in there to Da Nang?

Yes. Johnson, the, the response of Johnson, his mood when we first sent in the contingents of Marines was that the marines would secure the defenses that this would be the beginning of the end as it wa—were for the North Vietnamese. Every military action that Johnson took was taken with the foreknowledge that this was going to be the next to the last step. Keep in mind that almost every turning of the ratchet was supposed to be the next to the last turn.

And, the military saying a little more here, a little more there, contingent of Marines and we will have no really sealed off the further assaults and this whole thing will die out. But, the thing that also worried Johnson and constantly worried him was the instability of the, of the South Vietnamese government. And he felt that this was an, an absolute thorn that had to be plucked and these uh, these governments uh...I guess you might call the coat of arms of the Vietnamese government was a turn-style for god sake.

And, and I remember very vividly somebody would come in his office and say there’s a, looks like there’s a coup beginning in Vietnam, ‘t’d be another coup, you know coups were like uh, like fleas on a dog and Johnson said I don’t wanna hear anymore about this coup shit, I’ve, I’ve had enough of it and we’ve gotta find a way to stabilize those people out there.

And indeed uh...a good part of his mood was a, a kind of an angry introspection as to why can’t those mothers get their act together out there and find some stable way to hold on to their government. So... he, I can sum up his mood by saying that the military actions were taken two, for two reasons, one, to give stability to the South Vietnamese government, and two, that extra turn of the ratchet that the military would had confirmed to him would be the beginning of the end of uh, of uh the aggressive attitude of North Vietnam.

I want to get into just a few question about LBJ as a person. What made him tick. Uh, if you could just say briefly how would you describe him, what were his... highlight traits, for example, uh...was he insecure, was he driven, was he, was he nervous, was he uh, did he have a lot of confidence in himself? How would you describe him?

Well, I would say he was probably the most single dominating human being that I’ve ever been in contact with. Johnson believed that he had gifts of persuasion that weren’t given to most men. He believed if he could sit across a table from Ho Chi Minh, face to face, as Johnson’d say, just me and Ho, he could settle this war, he could find a way to negotiate it out. All of his parliamentary success told him that he and Ho could cut a deal that would satisfy Ho, would allow the US to withdraw, and would give that region a kind of a, of a blanket of stability for some time to come. He honestly and earnestly believed that. And he thought that he could pull it off if he could have that personal meeting with Ho.

But the, ‘e, could you characterize him just as a, as a man, as a person, just briefly.

Well, I’ll, uh, I’ll give you this characteristics of Johnson. One, he was the single most intelligent man I’ve ever known. I didn’t say educated because by education the standards of Johnson’s education were meager. But in sheer intelligence, that is, the weighing of a problem, the sorting out of all the alternatives, the fitting in together of a mosaic out of which comes the possibility of a decision, the insatiable, unsatisfied curiosity for facts and data to surround himself with all the numbers, the arithmetic that he had to have.

He was an, an incredible man for digging out all there was to know about a problem. In personal conversation he was like an avalanche, uh spending time with Johnson was like living on the end of a runway. Uh, you, you were overwhelmed by the confusion, the noise, the, the dominance of beings and things larger and mor formidable than you were. And uh, I never saw him in person-to-person confrontation where if he really wanted to persuade you, that you would not leave that room, at least partially persuaded though you came in determined that you would resist his blandishments.

He was, you talk about his as, the way he personalized everything, uh the way he talked about "my helicopters, my prime ministers," the way he stayed up late at night, or was into every situation going on.

Johnson, I think, personalized uh the war because it was a personal agony. Uh, if he said "my helicopters," or "my airplanes," it was not e, in a kind of a, an egocentric way, it was uh, the way he personalized everything that had to do with that war. I was with him on a dozen occasions early in the morning when he would be on the phone to the situation room, finding out how many casualties, the fate of one pilot lost in the sea and did they locate him and to tell me the rescue missions.

Uh, uh missions that he knew were going on, how many, how many people come back. And I remember one morning I was on the phone and his, he looked somber and he put the phone down and looked at me and anguish on his face and said, we lost six men last night. It was as if he had taken a swallow of carbolic acid. Six men lost. They weren’t statistics to Johnson, they were living human beings summoned to their death because he, the Commander-in-Chief, had ordered them into Vietnam. And he felt as if it was a cancer and a fungus and an explosive device inside him. Every time he got on that phone...and learned of one, two, three, five men killed. Too much, too much.

‘T’s all right if we have one more question?

...want to cut for a sec?

Yeah, sure.

I just want...

Okay?

Uh, you remember the daisy commercial?

Yes.

It was put on for two days and then yanked.

I remember the daisy commercial very well.

Can you tell us about it, why it was put on, why it was yanked, what did it try to achieve?

Well, of course, the daisy commercial as maybe some older people might remember was uh done by the Doyle, Dane, and Bernbach advertising firm. Bill Bernbach, an advertising genius if I ever saw one, was handling the 1964 Presidential campaign for Lyndon Johnson.

And uh, they came up with this commercial which was really one of the most creative commercials, political commercials I ever saw because it went right to the heart of the issue in the ’64 campaign which was whose finger do you trust on the button. It showed a lovely little seven, or eight-year-old girl plucking daisies in a field and all of the sudden she disappears and the screen has a mushroom cloud. This commercial was so devastating that a...

Okay, uh...

The daisy, the daisy commercial which was probably the most celebrated of all the commercials, television commercials used in the 1964 campaign, uh was done by the Doyle, Dane, and Bernbach firm as part of the overall strategy in our campaign. But it, it signified in a fundamental way the key and ‘n, and really in my judgment, the only issue in the campaign was whose finger do you trust on the button? Ergo, it showed that if you elected Goldwater there was the possibility of nuclear war. Now that’s a pretty tough, hard, and in many ways uh biting commercial. The first few days it was on the air, it had an incredible effect. Two effects. One, horror.

And two, cries of foul from the opposition. The...commercial withdraw for two reasons. One, it’s effect had already taken place. And number two, if we withdraw it we show that we don’t want to be unfair to the opposition. But as in any political campaign you can’t tell a jury disregard that remark. Anymore than you can tell the American people, disregard that commercial.

The impact had been made which was a spectacular and, in my judgment deep within the psyche of the American people and therefore it showed a certain gallantry on the part of the Johnson campaign to withdraw the commercial. Look, campaigns are jungles, and everybody who fights in a campaign understands that uh you go for the jugular and you do what you think will most persuade the American people to your point of view.

Terrific.

Okay, everybody quiet and thirty seconds and we'll get room tone. I'll just, I'll just shoot a wide shot and here we go.