Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (89 page)

Johnson's handling of the war also reflected an inner insecurity that he felt when dealing with issues of foreign policy. Having given little attention to such matters during his political career, he relied heavily as President, especially at first, on advisers. These with few exceptions were tough-minded Kennedy men who remembered what appeasement had done in the 1930s and who demanded that the United States remain firm. Munich, symbol of appeasement, must not happen again. Some, like Rusk, believed that Ho Chi Minh was the agent of a world Communist conspiracy, in this case run by China. McNamara, who especially impressed Johnson, glowed with confidence about the technological and military capacity of the United States. Johnson shared many of these beliefs, and he easily absorbed the determination of these and other advisers in 1964. In later years he never admitted that they—and he—could have been wrong. He clung resolutely—critics said blindly—to the course that he started steering early in his presidency.
²⁷

Domestic political considerations figured especially heavily in Johnson's thinking about the war. Like Kennedy, he feared the backlash that might whip him if he seemed "soft" on Vietnam. Repeating "lessons" from history, he recalled:

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 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.
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The significance of LBJ's personal traits accounted for the growing belief, especially by anti-war activists, that Vietnam was "Johnson's War." His critics are correct in pointing to the role of these traits and in arguing that Johnson, commander-in-chief until 1969, possessed the ultimate power to stem the tide of escalation. He was the last, best, and only chance for the United States to pull itself out of the quagmire.

Critics of Johnson are also accurate in pointing to his deceitfulness about events in Vietnam. As later revelations showed, this became significant as early as his handling of the so-called Tonkin Gulf crisis of August 1964. Following brief fighting between the United States destroyer
Maddox
and North Vietnamese torpedo boats in the gulf on August 1, Johnson said nothing to the American people. But the engagement riled him, and he sent a second destroyer, the C.
Turner Joy
, into the gulf to help the
Maddox
resume operations. It is clear that while he was not trying to provoke another fight, he was not trying to avoid one either. When he received reports of further confrontations in the gulf on August 4, he announced that the enemy had fired on the two destroyers. In retaliation he ordered five hours of American air attacks on enemy torpedo boat bases and nearby oil storage dumps. One American airman was killed in the action.

The President also took advantage of the encounters to call on Congress to authorize him as commander-in-chief to use "all necessary measures" to "repel any armed attacks against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression" in the area. Congress, responding with patriotic fervor, approved the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, as it was called, with only desultory debate. The votes were 416 to o in the House and 88 to 2 (Senators Ernest Gruening of Alaska and Wayne Morse of Oregon) in the Senate. The resolution, wide open in its grant of congressional power, indicated the power of the Cold War consensus in the United States. Johnson, who never asked Congress for a declaration of war, later cited it as authority for escalation far beyond anything the lawmakers could then have imagined.
²⁹

What really happened in the Tonkin Gulf, however, was much more mysterious than Johnson had let on. A brief naval engagement had indeed occurred in the gulf on August 1, leading North Vietnamese patrol boats to launch torpedoes at the
Maddox
. Fire from the
Maddox
and American carrier planes had badly damaged one of the boats. Events on August 4 were much less clear. As one of the destroyer commanders reported to McNamara at the time, it could not be ascertained that the enemy had fired torpedoes. Blips on radar screens—the basis for reports of attack—may have been caused by foul and freakish weather conditions. No American ships were hit, no men wounded or killed. McNamara and Johnson nonetheless chose to use the reports as pretext for a show of toughness that they had been seeking to make for some time. Johnson's goal was not to secure a resolution enabling him to wage full-scale war, either then or later. Rather, it was to put the North Vietnamese on notice that the United States was determined to fight back. It was also to show the American people that he was every bit as tough as, if not tougher than, Barry Goldwater, his opponent in the election campaign. To achieve these ends he resorted to deceit. He was to do so again and again in the ensuing fifty-three months of his administration.

In hailing the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution Johnson issued a statement that revealed much about his approach to the war in Vietnam. "Let no one doubt for a moment," he declared, "that we have the resources and we have the will to follow this course as long as it will take us." Few statements of the postwar era better expressed the grand expectations that America's liberal leaders maintained at that high tide of national optimism. Johnson, along with many of the American people, seemed to believe that the United States could build a Great Society at the same time it was fighting a war. It could afford both guns and butter. America could do it all.
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To
SINGLE OUT
LBJ
AS A VILLAIN
, however, is to ignore the extraordinarily powerful cultural and political forces that long had dominated American thinking about Vietnam and foreign policy. It was not just Johnson or erstwhile Kennedy advisers such as McNamara and Rusk who demanded American firmness in Southeast Asia. As the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution indicated—it was very popular with the public—virtually all political leaders agreed with them in 1964–65. Preventing the spread of Communism, after all, remained the guiding star of American policy. Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy had followed it, as had their partisan opponents. All three Presidents had affirmed American support of South Vietnam and enunciated versions of the domino theory as a rationale. It was Johnson's fate to become President at a time when South Vietnam, following the assassination of Diem, was faltering badly. It was difficult for him to temporize, as his predecessors (in varying degrees) had done.
³¹

Some of those who demanded resolute action thought Johnson temporized far too much. Top military figures in 1964 insisted on the need for American bombing of North Vietnam. When LBJ finally agreed to it in 1965, they chafed under his policy of calibrated incrementalism, an approach that involved significant escalation but that stopped short of full-scale military engagement with the enemy. General Curtis LeMay, air force chief of staff, exclaimed that the United States should bomb North Vietnam "back to the Stone Age." Admiral Ulysses S. Grant Sharp, naval commander in the Pacific, complained that America's bombing amounted to "pecking away at seemingly random targets." He added later, "We could have flattened every war-making facility in North Vietnam. But the handwringers had center stage. . . . The most powerful country in the world did not have the willpower needed to meet the situation. "
³²

Other military men also blamed Johnson for timidity in his waging of the war. Westmoreland said later, "It takes the full strength of a tiger to kill a rabbit." A battalion commander added, "Remember, we're watchdogs you unchain to eat up the burglar. Don't ask us to be mayors or sociologists worrying about hearts and minds. Let us eat up the burglar our own way and then put us back on the chain."
³³
Some of these critics argued that the United States should have dispatched American troops against enemy sanctuaries in Laos and Cambodia. They emphasized again and again that the United States should have done much more massive bombing of North Vietnamese military installations and infrastructure. Some urged the mining of Haiphong harbor, access point for outside aid to the North, and the bombing of Hanoi. Holding great expectations about America's capacity to control world events, they could not understand how a relatively small nation such as North Vietnam could survive against a world power like the United States.
³⁴

Other analysts of American military strategy grumbled that Westmoreland's emphasis, a "search and destroy" strategy that sought to chase down enemy forces in South Vietnam, entailed much wasted effort. The search and destroy approach, they noted, devastated a great many villages, making enemies of the people the United States was trying to help. Some of these critics thought it would have been better to concentrate American forces near the demilitarized zone dividing the antagonists and along borders with Laos and Cambodia. The key, they insisted, was to take the war to the North, where the enemy was coming from, and pay less attention to unrest in the South. Others said it might have been better to devote greater effort to pacification, as it was called. This was a policy, intermittently employed after 1965, that depended less on search and destroy missions and more on civil-military programs to promote stability and peace in heavily populated regions of South Vietnam.

It remains extraordinarily doubtful, however, that military options such as these—many of them fine-tuned with hindsight—would have turned the tide. Hawks were correct that Johnson hamstrung the generals and the admirals: North Vietnam never had to fear the worst. But throughout the postwar era, hawkish critics had always tended to exaggerate the potential of military actions, especially bombing, to achieve political objectives. Like McNamara, they believed overoptimistically in the omnipotence of American technology. And they often presumed the superiority of white, Western ways: Asians, they thought, could not stand up for long against Western civilization. These were misplaced and ethnocentric assumptions that badly misread the situation in Vietnam. What stands out about American involvement in Southeast Asia, especially in retrospect, is the extent to which a truly enormous military commitment—both of bombs and of troops—failed to stop, let alone defeat, a much less industrialized adversary. Short of obliterating much of the North by dropping nuclear bombs on civilian centers—an option not considered at high levels—it is hard to see how greater military engagement could have achieved the goals of the United States.

Johnson's military problem, in some ways more complicated than that of his predecessors in the White House, stemmed in large part from two simple facts. First, many people in South Vietnam showed little stomach for the fight. Diem's successors, it turned out, were even less successful than he in curbing corruption and in gaining popular support. South Vietnamese leaders cooperated poorly with pacification programs, which were ill-coordinated with military strategy and often lacked even elementary security.
³⁵
One-third of South Vietnamese combat troops deserted every year.
³⁶
One of the most important lessons that might have been learned from the Vietnam War was that it is difficult for a nation—even a world power—to reform and protect a client state that cannot or will not manage itself. It may be impossible to provide protection if the state in trouble also faces widespread civil unrest and invasion, as was the case with South Vietnam.
³⁷

Second, the North Vietnamese were willing to fight hard and for however long it took. This was always the biggest obstacle to American chances for long-range success—however measured—in Vietnam. The longer the fighting went on—in a far-away land that seemed of little strategic value to the United States—the shorter the patience of the American people, who tolerated far fewer casualties than the enemy did.
³⁸
One can perhaps imagine the United States massing hundreds of thousands of troops near North Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laotian borders while trying to maintain a degree of order and safety in urban areas in parts of the South. But Ho's commanders were very good at infiltrating and at motivating their men, and the frontiers to be guarded extended more than 1,000 miles. Even by positioning 600,000 or
so
men in Vietnam—for who knew how many years?—the United States might not have been able to slow down infiltration from the North. Behind the border, moreover, Ho had a reserve army of 500,000 or so men. China threatened to enter the war if the United States went after Ho in the North. And who could tell about the rapidly arming Soviets, with whom LBJ hoped to maintain a modicum of détente?

Debates such as these over American military strategy animated armchair generals long after the war had ended. In 1964 and early 1965, however, Johnson firmly resisted the most hawkish advice. He feared alienating allies and provoking China and the Soviet Union. Equally important, he did care deeply about his Great Society agenda. To wage a major war in Vietnam might endanger passage of his domestic programs. Heeding the counsel of his closest advisers, he determined in late 1964 to escalate, but only after the election and in a calibrated and incremental way.