From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776 (122 page)

An administration already bogged down in Vietnam struggled with these intractable and dangerous problems. United States officials ignored demands for an alliance while maintaining close ties with Israel. The United States joined Britain in sponsoring UN Resolution 242, calling on Israel to relinquish territory in exchange for Arab acceptance of its existence, the so-called land-for-peace formula. It pressed Israel to negotiate and also to refrain from settling the occupied regions. It persisted in trying to keep Israel from going nuclear. When Israel refused to give assurances

regarding nuclear weapons, LBJ rejected its requests for F-4 jets. The pattern of Israeli resistance to compromise was already set, however, and the president eventually gave in on the aircraft—a major escalation of the regional arms race—in return for meaningless assurances that Israel would not introduce nuclear weapons into the Middle East.
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To protect its broader interests, the United States adopted a "three pillars" approach, adding Saudi Arabia and Iran as the other two bulwarks of
its regional strategy. After the Six-Day War, it cemented long-standing ties with these two oil-rich kingdoms with arms deals and other inducements. LBJ cultivated the shah of Iran with special care. Scrapping Kennedy's efforts to push reforms on a key ally, the president responded to the shah's endless complaints about the paucity of U.S. aid and his only slightly veiled threats to lean toward the USSR by lavishing military aid on him through numerous hastily concocted deals.
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Such policies served U.S. short-term interests, but they did nothing to stanch Arab radicalism, and in Iran they would have fateful consequences.

McNamara's replacement, Clark Clifford, remembered it as the most difficult year of his life, a year that seemed like five years; Rusk called it a "blur."
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For the United States and the rest of the world, 1968 was a year quite unlike any other. In Western and Eastern Europe, loosely connected "networks of rebellion," composed mostly of young radicals inspired by Mao Zedong and Che Guevara, mounted major protests against the Vietnam War and U.S. imperialism, challenged their own governments, and sought an elusive third way between capitalism and Communism. The upheaval helped to bring down de Gaulle and provoke a Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. For Americans, 1968 was a year of unparalleled tragedy, marked by the assassination of civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and presidential candidate Robert Kennedy within months of each other. It was a year of turmoil, with riots in Washington and other cities following King's death, the takeover of Columbia University by student radicals in April, and in August during the Democratic convention warfare in the streets of Chicago between police and anti-war protestors. The Johnson administration faced major foreign policy crises with North Korea, Vietnam, world gold markets, and Czechoslovakia. For the United States and the world, this halfway point between the end of World War II and the end of the Cold War was a watershed year.
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The year of crisis began on January 23 when North Korea seized the U.S. intelligence ship
Pueblo
in the Sea of Japan and imprisoned its officers and crew. In retrospect, the ill-fated voyage of the
Pueblo
seems a classic
example of Murphy's Law in action. The ship was woefully prepared for a dangerous mission, its crew inexperienced and ill trained, its skipper, Captain Lloyd Bucher, a submariner assigned to a onetime cargo vessel. Navy brass shrugged off the risks of electronic espionage off the coast of North Korea. When the ship was attacked, Bucher did not try to escape or fight. The crew did not destroy highly classified documents or its electronic gear, providing the enemy an intelligence windfall. LBJ wisely resisted demands to retaliate militarily. Underestimating North Korea's independence, he first sought to retrieve the ship and crew through the USSR. In fact, it took eleven months of patient and sometimes excruciating negotiations and a skillfully crafted apology to retrieve the sailors without their ship.
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A week after the
Pueblo
incident, North Vietnam and the NLF launched the biggest offensive of the war. Striking at Tet, the beginning of the lunar new year and the most festive of Vietnamese holidays, they shifted their attacks from the countryside to the previously secure urban areas of South Vietnam. In Saigon, the center of U.S. power, they hit the airport, the presidential palace, and, most dramatically, the U.S. embassy. Although caught off guard, U.S. and South Vietnamese forces repulsed the initial assaults, inflicted huge casualties, and retook lost ground. But the suddenness and magnitude of the offensive had a huge impact in the United States. Observing the events on nightly television news, a public that had been told the United States was winning the war was shocked and profoundly disillusioned. An "air of gloom" hung over White House discussions, one LBJ adviser later recalled; another likened the mood to that in 1861 after the first Battle of Bull Run.
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The choices open to policymakers all seemed bad. Top officials speculated that seizure of the
Pueblo
was part of a concerted Communist effort to open a "second front" to divert U.S. attention and resources from Vietnam. Some feared a second round of attacks in Vietnam or possibly even Berlin or the Middle East. Johnson's military advisers sought to use the crises to force mobilization of the reserves and a full military buildup. Their proposal to increase the armed forces by 206,000 troops especially alarmed civilian leaders. The estimated price tag of $10 billion imposed enormous economic and political burdens in an election year and when public anxiety about the war was already high.
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An economic crisis, itself partly caused by the war, significantly influenced policy deliberations. The war added costs as high as $3.6 billion per year to an economy already strained by domestic spending, causing inflation and a growing balance of payments deficit that weakened the dollar in international markets and threatened the world monetary structure. A financial crisis in Britain, leading to devaluation of the pound, caused huge losses from the gold pool. In March 1968, pressure on the dollar mounted and gold purchases reached new highs. At Washington's urging, the London gold market closed on March 14. The request for more troops was increasingly linked to the nation's economic
woes. "The town is in an atmosphere of crisis," Dean Acheson confided to a friend.
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At this crucial point, the architects of major U.S. Cold War policies concluded that the Vietnam War was destroying the nation's overall security position and pressed for disengagement. Acheson, NSC-68 author Paul Nitze, veteran diplomat W. Averell Harriman, and Clifford, all key Truman advisers, formed a sort of cabal with dovish White House advisers such as McPherson to persuade Johnson to change course. "Our leader ought to be more concerned with areas that count," the imperious former secretary of state and hard-core Atlanticist insisted.
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Acheson took the lead in a crucial March 26–27 meeting of the Wise Men, a group of senior foreign policy experts, including a number of former Truman advisers, the president occasionally consulted. The Wise Men generally concurred that in Vietnam the United States could "no longer do the job we have set out to do in the time we have left and we must begin to take steps to disengage." "The establishment bastards have bailed out," a dispirited LBJ is said to have snarled after the meeting.
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The crisis of hegemony was "resolved" in a manner both inconclusive and anticlimactic. Governments rarely deal with complex issues head-on, democratic governments especially so. The administration thus improvised short-term expedients without really addressing the larger issues raised by Acheson and his cohort. Under U.S. leadership, an international bankers' meeting in Washington in late March approved stopgap measures to stabilize the gold market. On the most pressing issue, LBJ sought to quiet domestic unrest by deescalating the war without scaling back U.S. objectives or reassessing Vietnam's place among national priorities. He rejected the military's request for additional troops and began to shift more responsibility for the fighting to the South Vietnamese. In a dramatic, nationally televised address on March 31, 1968, he announced a major cutback of the bombing of North Vietnam and proclaimed his willingness to undertake peace negotiations. In an announcement that stunned the nation, he revealed he would not be a candidate for another term as president. A war originally undertaken to sustain U.S. hegemony over the postwar international order was scaled back to maintain an economic and military system on the verge of collapse.
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Not surprisingly, Johnson's hopes for a late-term peace went unrealized. Hanoi accepted his invitation to talk, and negotiations began in Paris in May, but they quickly deadlocked over such issues as the bombing of North Vietnam and the makeup of a new South Vietnamese government. In the summer of 1968, the Soviets helped broker a deal to get the talks off dead center. On October 31, a reluctant LBJ finally agreed to the total bombing halt Hanoi had long demanded. But the president's last-ditch effort to salvage negotiations and perhaps the presidential candidacy of Vice President Humphrey ran up against formidable forces. Fearing a last-minute peace deal that would sabotage their candidate's hopes, Richard Nixon's campaign officials, working through Harvard professor, sometimes LBJ consultant, and Republican foreign policy adviser Henry A. Kissinger and go-between Anna Chennault, widow of World War II China theater air commander Gen. Claire Chennault, urged South Vietnamese president Nguyen Van Thieu to block the rush toward peace. Thieu needed little persuading. Only after Nixon had been elected by a very thin margin and under enormous pressure from the Johnson administration did he agree to send delegates to Paris. Once there, the South Vietnamese raised procedural roadblocks that thwarted any remaining hope of a settlement.
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Frustrated in Vietnam, Johnson in his last months vigorously pursued detente with the USSR. He was deeply committed to arms control negotiations to ease the threat of nuclear war, redeem an administration tainted by Vietnam, and leave his mark on history. The process had begun with small but significant U.S.-Soviet agreements to reduce production of weapons-grade uranium (1964) and ban nuclear weapons in space (1966). Johnson's efforts to initiate negotiations on strategic arms limitations met a cautious response from Moscow. But France and China's emergence as nuclear powers and fears that West Germany might get nuclear weapons spurred serious non-proliferation negotiations. On July 1, 1968, the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union signed a Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT); signatories who possessed nuclear weapons agreed not to help others acquire them, and those who did not have them agreed not to purchase or develop them. More than one hundred nations eventually signed the NPT. By forestalling West German acquisition of nuclear weapons, it helped promote European stability. But France refused to sign, while agreeing to abide by the terms. China and aspiring nuclear powers Israel, India, Pakistan, and South Africa rejected the treaty. Despite its obvious flaws, LBJ hailed the NPT as one of his
most important achievements.
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The administration also seemed to achieve a breakthrough when the USSR in the summer of 1968 agreed to begin strategic arms negotiations. A Kosygin-Johnson summit was set for Leningrad in September.

The Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August doomed the summit and arms control negotiations. Moscow had watched anxiously during the legendary Prague Spring of 1968 as Czech leaders responding to popular pressures promoted democratization while reiterating their fealty to the Warsaw Pact. Increasingly nervous about the spread of "anti-Soviet bacillus" into other Eastern bloc states and their own republics, and aware of the weakness of Czech troops along the German border, a reluctant Kremlin finally sent Warsaw Pact troops into Czechoslovakia.
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Two weeks later, Brezhnev proclaimed a Soviet duty to intervene anywhere socialism was threatened, a statement Western journalists dubbed the Brezhnev Doctrine. The move caught Washington completely off guard. Vividly remembering Budapest in 1956 when the United States seemed to encourage revolt and then did nothing, U.S. officials went out of their way to avoid any appearance of interference, even to the point of toning down Radio Free Europe broadcasts. They continued naively to reckon that Moscow would not risk detente by intervening militarily. Ambassador to Washington Anatoly Dobrynin was assigned the unwelcome task of explaining the invasion to the president. To his surprise, a completely unsuspecting LBJ insisted on talking about the summit and in a bizarre scene offered his startled—and much relieved—guest a whiskey while regaling him with tales of Texas.
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