Before the Storm (58 page)

This talk of crime and “morality on a sliding scale” was novel in a presidential campaign. America had begun suffering a crime wave. Violent crimes had increased from 120 per 100,000 in 1960 to 180 per 100,000 by 1964. Headline followed headline: the “Career Girl Murders” (a burglar and heroin addict on parole had beaten two young Manhattan women to death with his hands); the Boston Strangler (thirteen women had opened their doors to a man who was still at large, who sexually molested his victims, then choked them without leaving fingerprints). Chicago's Mother of the Year and her daughter were found strangled and bound facedown in their home. Goldwater's speeches now occasionally drifted into images of streets become jungles, women walking unsafe, sentimental judges giving more concern to the rehabilitation of the criminal than the vindication of his crime. The subject touched something in him. And in his crowds—who responded with electricity whenever it was raised.

The crowds were fantastic. On March 6 at the Manchester Armory, Goldwater was joined by Efrem Zimbalist Jr., Walter Brennan, and, on film-introduced as “the Gipper” in deference to his role in
Knute Rockne, All American-Ronald
Reagan. Goldwater brought the 3,500 spectators filling the seats and the aisles to a kind of communal ecstasy with a line cribbed from Richard Nixon's acceptance speech: “You are wrong, Mr. Khrushchev. Our children will not live under Communism. Your children will live under freedom!” Two nights before the March 10 election day, the Manchester speech was broadcast on TV.

Steeled by conviction against bitter cold, his volunteers performed heroic feats, contacting an astonishing 60 percent of the state's households (Lamphrey had finally prevailed upon Cotton to let the campaign workers knock on doors). Goldwater, overcome by the momentum, predicted he would get 40 percent of the vote. “I've got it made,” he pronounced upon returning to D.C. At his New Hampshire headquarters on Monday there was a victory party in all but name. Outside, snow began to fall. That cheered them some more: snow would deter “moderates,” not Goldwater voters.

By the time the polls opened on Tuesday morning, there was half a foot of snow on the ground. But early indications suggested a record turnout (Goldwater workers suspected a mass Rockefeller effort to wheel senior citizens into the booths to save their Social Security). By the time the polls closed, there was over a foot of snow on the ground. Voters had kept on coming. And they delivered an upset.

Goldwater was the choice of 23 percent, Rockefeller 21 (having estimated that he had shaken 50,000 hands, that worked out to 2.564 clasps per vote). Nixon got 17; Margaret Chase Smith, who had not bought any TV time or returned for a second trip, got 3. Seventy-seven souls wrote in the name of Bill Scranton, a recent
Life
and
Newsweek
cover boy.

The winner, with 35 percent, was Henry Cabot Lodge. His unknown delegates swept. A joke was coined: A backcountry farmer is asked why New Hampshire chose Lodge. “Dunno,” he replied. “Mebbe 'cause he din't bother us none.”

Lodge received the news while striding down the ramp of a plane upon his return from an inspection tour to Hue with Secretary McNamara. He announced, “I do not plan to go to the United States. I do not plan to leave Saigon. I do not intend to resign.” (In Saigon, the day before the returns came in, Lodge made the extraordinary suggestion to Robert McNamara that South Vietnam be turned into a U.S. protectorate and that he be appointed “High Commissioner.”) In D.C., Barry Goldwater's handlers were dithering with a statement backstage when Goldwater strode into the ballroom and announced: “I goofed up somewhere.” It was the first loss of his political career. He toyed with quitting.

He was the only one not to declare victory. Kitchel told the press he was pleased “that a candidate from the Far West ... could do so well in the New England state of New Hampshire.” Rockefeller said he welcomed the results as a victory for moderation. Smith characterized the primary as proof that voters wanted a third choice. Nixon told reporters, “I feel that there is no man in this country who can make a case against Mr. Johnson more effectively than I can,” let it be known for the benefit of conservatives looking for a new home that he had never endorsed the civil rights bill pending in the Senate—and prepared for a stature-boosting trip to the Far East. In the
New York Times,
Scotty Reston wrote that “the political pros are now betting on Gov. William W. Scranton”—he of the 77 votes—“former Vice President Richard M. Nixon or Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge” to win the nomination. “They seem to agree”: Goldwater and Rockefeller were virtually eliminated from contention.

T
he new savior of the Republican Party prepared for work every morning by strapping a sidearm to his shoulder. He stepped into the backseat of a fortified Checker sedan, which rolled past the barbed-wire cordon in front of his house, then started in on one of several routes, shifted at random, to the United States Embassy at 39 Ham Nghi Boulevard. Plainclothes bodyguards at his side, he strode into the 90-degree heat and 90 percent humidity, past the sidewalk barricades and saluting retinues of military police, then into a lobby guarded by U.S. Marines. He took the back elevator to a sparsely furnished fifth-floor office and placed his revolver next to the .357 magnum he kept in a desk drawer, and then he began his day as servant of a nation in Vietnam, as Lyndon Johnson put it, “at the request of a friend.”

When Dwight D. Eisenhower had called Lodge to ask whether he had anything to do with the November 1, 1963, coup against the Diem government, Lodge obligingly replied that he hadn't. He was lying. Henry Cabot Lodge had been chosen as ambassador for his unsentimentality, for his lack of concern for bureaucratic niceties, for his monumental ego that vouchsafed he wouldn't leave before getting the job done—the job, in this case, being one of convincing Diem to democratize his regime. It turned out Lodge's ego was an impediment. Flying from Japan to present his credentials, Lodge had protested that the plane the Administration sent was too small to accommodate all the reporters he had invited. Once installed in office, Lodge refused to meet with Diem until he detected an appropriate display of kowtowing. He much preferred, at any rate, the course being urged by Kennedy hands Averell Harriman, Roger Hilsman, and Mike Forrestal: a coup. Lodge was less worried about possible instability in the wake of this course of action; like his grandfather Henry Cabot Lodge Sr. urging annexation of the Philippines in 1898, he believed “the U.S. should be prepared to run the country” on its own. Other Vietnam policy makers despised him as a reckless fool. The in-country military chief, General Paul
Harkin, hardly spoke to him. Lodge spoke glibly of Diem's assassination, as if it pleased him.

Republican voters who responded to Lodge's victory in New Hampshire by giving him 42 percent in nationwide polls knew no more of this than they did the color of his shorts. What Americans didn't know about Vietnam was in many ways
becoming
America's Vietnam policy: an increasingly desperate military attempt to “send a message” to the North Vietnamese's supposed Soviet and Chinese masters, alongside attempts to hide any escalation from the American people.

The operative military doctrine, “graduated pressure,” was a direct corollary of anxieties over nuclear escalation: Vietcong advance should be met with tit-for-tat response, carefully calibrated to simultaneously signal resolve and foreclose the possibility that China or the USSR would become directly involved. It wasn't working. By the time of Lyndon Johnson's inauguration on the tarmac of Dallas's Love Field on November 22, 1963, 16,000 American advisers, or 15,000 or 20,000—dodgy accounting methods made it hard for even the Pentagon to keep the numbers straight—were on the ground, 108 Americans were dead, and the National Liberation Front still collected taxes in all but three of South Vietnam's forty-four provinces. The Johnson Administration reacted by beginning a four-month experiment in graduated pressure set to begin on February 1, “Op Plan 34-A.” The effort would include secret raids against the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the labyrinth of dirt paths the North Vietnamese had hacked out of the bush at the border with Laos and Cambodia to supply the rebels; reconnaissance flights over Laos; commando raids along the North Vietnamese coast; and naval shelling of North Vietnamese military assets from ships in the Gulf of Tonkin. These options were chosen with plausible denial in mind (on reconnaissance flights, for example, American pilots brought along Vietnamese trainees—they called them “sandbags”—so that if the plane were downed it could be claimed that a Vietnamese was the pilot).

Plausible denial to Moscow and Peking, and, as President Johnson began obsessing more and more about the upcoming election in November, to Milwaukee and Peoria. Military concerns were subordinated to public relations considerations. “We're going to rough them up a little bit in the days to come,” the President explained in one of his off-the-record calls to publishers, this one to Scripps-Howard's Walker Stone. Then in his press conference the next day he said that he would welcome neutralization talks between the two countries, for, after all, we weren't at war with North Vietnam.

On February 9, as America watched those lovable moptops on the
Ed Sullivan Show
and the merry Draft Lodge band busied themselves with getting
their first New Hampshire mailing out the door, graduated pressure did not deter Communist guerrillas from exploding a shrapnel bomb that killed several Americans at play on a Saigon softball diamond. Nor did it keep them from winning control of 45 percent of the land in South Vietnam by the end of the month—up a third since America's last brilliant plan, the November coup. The Joint Chiefs, whom Johnson respected no more than Kennedy had, finally succeeded in getting a memo before the President's eyes expressing their opinion that graduated pressure would mean endless American involvement with no end in sight. Only direct U.S. air attacks against the Ho Chi Minh Trail and military and industrial targets in North Vietnam, they argued, would make the Reds see reason. Retaliation from Russia or China, let alone nuclear retaliation, was unlikely; the only other alternative was “the loss of Vietnam.”

This was the sort of thing that made Lyndon Johnson sit bolt upright.
The Democrats lost China:
as congressmen both he and JFK had watched as good Democrats had been carried out of Congress as if by a tidal wave when the Republicans had raised that cry in 1950. “If I tried to pull out completely now from Vietnam we would have another Joe McCarthy red scare on our hands,” Kennedy had told an aide in 1963. Unfortunately, Kennedy and Johnson's other shared formative experience in foreign policy was the election of Eisenhower to the White House in 1952 on the back of the claim that the Democrats bogged us down in Korea. Holding the line against further Communist insurgency, holding it against escalating American commitment: these were the Scylla and Charybdis through which Lyndon Johnson steered his Vietnam thinking—a tortuous course that, some sleepless nights, seemed to threaten to crack open his skull. “They say, ‘get in or get out,' ” he moaned to Mac Bundy after coming out of a March 4 meeting with the Joint Chiefs, pictures from New Hampshire perhaps crowding the three TV screens the President kept in the Oval Office to watch all the network news shows at once. “I'm a trustee,” he protested. “I've got to win an election.” Until then, “let's see if we can't find enough things to do to keep them off base, and stop these shipments that are coming in from Laos, and take a few selected targets to upset them a little bit, without getting another Korea operation started.”

He held off a reckoning by sending McNamara on a fact-finding mission. If McNamara could tour the countryside with the new South Vietnamese leader, General Khanh, the two men posing for pictures with their arms linked and held high to show this was Vietnam's fight but that America was behind her all the way, how much further could the Communists get? And so it went: two days before the voting in the New Hampshire primary, pudgy, goateed little General Khanh took to the jungle hustings with Bob McNamara
and Cabot Lodge (who was fond of schooling the general on the fine points of American electioneering)—three LBJ proxies off on the strangest campaign trip in history.

McNamara wondered about the blank expressions on the villagers' faces. These were the reactions of a people whose national memory was wracked by hundreds of years of thwarted attempts at independence, who feared yet one more foreign power staking its claim. “The greatest gift for us was when McNamara came and toured the countryside, holding up Nguyen Khanh's arm,” reflected the head of the National Liberation Front (which received only 10 percent of its weaponry from Communist allies, compared to the $1.5 million the United States pumped into Vietnam daily). “This saved our propaganda cadres a great deal of effort.”

The gambit didn't work in the jungles. It did the trick at home. Even conservative
U.S. News
saw McNamara's tour as an occasion for optimism. Five hundred thousand French had been defeated in Vietnam in 1954, they allowed. “French generals, however, misunderstood the nature of the conflict”—not having McNamara to do what they presumed he had just done, earn the political loyalty of the peasantry.

 

Johnson breathed a sigh of relief. Now the decks were cleared for what he really cared about: continuing his remarkable string of domestic victories. His eye-popping January 8 State of the Union address was a liberal wish list: slum clearance, a mass transit program, minimum wage extensions, new public housing units—and two extraordinary initiatives inherited in various stages of vagueness from JFK: an $11 billion across-the-board tax cut and an “all-out war on human poverty and unemployment in these United States.”