Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (125 page)

But the experience of the twentieth century indicates that self-imposed restraints by a civilized power are worse than useless. They are interpreted by friend and foe alike as evidence, not of humanity, but of guilt and lack of righteous conviction. Despite them, indeed because of them, Johnson lost the propaganda battle, not only in the West as a whole but especially in the USA, where it mattered most. Initially the Vietnam war had the support of the moderate liberal consensus. The US has a major interest in the defence of Vietnam,’ the
Washington Post
wrote, 7 April 1961. ‘American prestige is very much involved in the effort to protect the Vietnamese people from Communist absorption.’ The
New York Times
admitted, 12 March 1963, that The cost [of saving Vietnam] is large, but the cost of South-East Asia coming under the domination of Russia and Communist China would be still larger.’ On 21 May 1964 the
Times
urged: if we demonstrate that we will make whatever military and political effort [denying victory to Communism] requires, the Communists sooner or later will also recognize reality.’ The
Post
insisted, 1 June 1964, that America continue to show in Vietnam that ‘persistence in aggression is fruitless and possibly deadly’. But the
Times
deserted Johnson early in 1966, the
Post
in summer 1967.
⁸⁸
About the same time the
TV
networks became neutral, then increasingly hostile.

What the Administration came to fear was not editorial censure so much as the tendentious presentation of the news. The US media became strongly biased in some cases. More often it was misled, skilfully and deliberately; or misled itself. A much publicized photograph of a ‘prisoner’ being thrown from a US helicopter was in fact staged. Accounts of American ‘tiger cages’ at Con Son island were inaccurate and sensationalized. Another widely used photo of a young girl burned by napalm created the impression, which was in fact quite untrue, that many thousands of children had been incinerated by Americans.
⁸⁹

Even more serious was the notion increasingly conveyed by the media that Vietcong victory was inevitable. This came to a decisive head in the handling of the Vietcong ‘Tet Offensive’ on 30 January 1968. It was the first major offensive in the open the Communists had tried. It was designed to achieve complete tactical success and detonate a mass-uprising. In fact it failed on both counts. For the first
time the Vietcong suffered heavy casualties in conventional combat, and their army emerged from the engagement very much weaker militarily.
⁹⁰
But the media, especially
TV
, presented it as a decisive Vietcong victory, an American Dien Bien Phu. An elaborate study of the coverage, published in 1977, showed exactly how this reversal of the truth, which was not on the whole deliberate, came about.
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The image not the reality of Tet was probably decisive, especially among influential East Coast liberals. In general, American public opinion strongly backed the war, which was throughout more popular than the Korean War. According to the pollsters the only hostile category was what they described as ‘the Jewish subgroup’.
⁹²
Johnson’s popularity rating rose whenever he piled on the pressure: it leapt 14 per cent when he started the bombing.
⁹³
Throughout the fighting, far more Americans were critical of Johnson for doing too little than for doing too much. The notion of a great swing away from the war in public opinion, and above all the axiom that the young opposed it, was an invention. In fact support for withdrawal was never over 20 per cent until after the November 1968 election, by which time the decision to get out had already been taken. Support for intensifying the war was always greater among the under thirty-fives than among older people; young white males were the most consistent group backing escalation.
⁹⁴

It was not the American people which lost its stomach for the kind of sacrifices Kennedy had demanded in his Inaugural. It was the American leadership. In the last months of 1967, and especially after Tet, the American establishment crumpled. The Defence Secretary, Clark Clifford, turned against the war; so did old Dean Acheson. Senate hard-liners began to oppose further reinforcements.
⁹⁵
Finally Johnson himself, diffidently campaigning for re-election, lost heart on 12 March 1968 when his vote sagged in the New Hampshire primary. He threw in the electoral towel and announced he would spend the rest of his term making peace. It was not the end of the war. But it was the end of America’s will and effort to win it. The trouble with the American ruling class was that it believed what it read in the newspapers, and they saw New Hampshire as a victory for peace. In fact, among the anti-Johnson voters the Hawks outnumbered the Doves by three to two.
⁹⁶
Johnson lost the primary, and with it the war, because he was not tough enough.

There was, however, an additional and more sinister factor which knocked the stuffing out of the President, whose slogan was ‘All the Way with LBJ’. In March 1968, when the Vietnam command asked for an additional 206,000 men, the Treasury Secretary, Henry Fowler, protested. To grant the request, he warned, would mean
cutting not only other defence programmes but major domestic programmes as well; and, even so, the dollar would suffer.
⁹⁷
The move recalled Macmillan’s chilling intervention in the cabinet debates during Britain’s Suez crisis. It was a significant turning-point in American history: the first time the Great Republic, the richest nation on earth, came up against the limits of its financial resources.

For Johnson himself the warning was a particularly bitter blow. More than Kennedy even, more perhaps than anyone, he had revelled in the illusions of the 1960s. No one had believed more passionately in the strength of the West and in particular in the boundless capacity of the American economy to deliver. He was not merely the last, he was the greatest, of the big spenders. He referred to his domestic spending programme as ‘the beautiful woman’. He told his biographer: ‘I was determined to be a leader of war
and
a leader of peace. I wanted both, I believed in both and I believed America had the resources to provide for both.’
⁹⁸
Under Truman and Eisenhower, defence was the biggest item in Federal spending. Spending on housing, education, welfare and other ‘human resources’ (as they were termed) was only about a quarter of the budget and less than 5 per cent of
GNP
. Some attempt was made to balance the budget, except in a bad recession year. Until Eisenhower retired, American public finance was run in all essentials on conventional lines.

The big change in principle came under Kennedy. In the autumn of 1962 the Administration committed itself to a new and radical principle of creating budgetary deficits even when there was no economic emergency, the budget being already in deficit and the economy moving upward. Having thus given himself financial leeway, Kennedy introduced a new concept of ‘big government’: the ‘problem-eliminator’. Every area of human misery could be classified as a ‘problem’; then the Federal government could be armed to ‘eliminate’ it. ‘The poverty problem’ had been made a fashionable subject in the early 1960s by Michael Harrington’s best-seller,
The Other America
(1962), which Kennedy found shocking and stimulating. In 1963 he introduced his ‘poverty programme’, along with a mass of other high-spending legislation. Kennedy found it difficult to re-educate Congress to his new expansionist ideas, and his legislation piled up. But resistance was beginning to collapse even before Kennedy was murdered;
⁹⁹
and Lyndon Johnson was able to use the emotional response to the assassination, plus his own wonderful skills as a Congressional manager, to push through the greatest and most expensive legislative programme in American history.

In his first State of the Union address, 8 January 1964, Johnson announced: ‘This Administration today, here and now, declares unconditional war on poverty.’ When he signed his first anti-poverty
bill, the Equal Opportunities Act, on 20 August 1964, he boasted: ‘Today, for the first time in the history of the human race, a great nation is able to make and is willing to make a commitment to eradicate poverty among its people.’
¹⁰⁰
That summer, preparing for his election campaign, he turned his ‘beautiful woman’ into flesh: the ‘Great Society’. America, he said, had to acquire ‘the ‘wisdom to use wealth to enrich and elevate our national life’, to move not only to ‘the rich society and the powerful society but upward to the Great Society’, which rested on ‘abundance and liberty to all’, where ‘every child’ would ‘find knowledge to enrich his mind and enlarge his talents’ and everyone would be able to satisfy ‘the desire for beauty and the hunger for community’.
¹⁰¹
The Great Society was supposedly endorsed in the November 1964 elections, which Johnson won overwhelmingly against an exceptionally weak opponent. The bills came rolling out: the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, the Medicare Act, the Rent Supplement Act, various poverty acts. Johnson called 20–27 July 1965 ‘the most productive and most historic legislative week in Washington during this century’. ‘They say Jack Kennedy had style,’ he snorted, ‘but I’m the one who got the bills passed.’ One liberal journalist, Tom Wicker, exulted in the
New York Times:
‘They are rolling the bills out of Congress these days the way Detroit turns super-sleek, souped-up autos off the assembly-line.’ The first session of the 89th Congress was the most productive in fundamental legislation since the early days of Woodrow Wilson. Johnson had a 68 per cent success-rate, the highest in history, for his bills, 207 of which were made law, ‘the building-blocks of a better America’, as he called them.
¹⁰²
He drew a conscious parallel with the war in Vietnam, also – as he saw it – an exercise in idealism, by the blatant use of military metaphor. He created ten anti-poverty ‘task forces’. He told housing bureaucrats: ‘I’m going to convert you from armchair generals to front-line commanders.’ There was a Youth corps for ‘neighbourhoods’, a Job corps for ‘dropouts’, Head Start for pre-school children, Outward Bound for college students, and countless other schemes. The cost soared: $30 billion a year in the first poverty programme; then another $30 billion added towards the end of the term.
¹⁰³
These sums soon became built into the structure of the Federal outlay and proved impossible to reduce. Indeed they were increased. Thanks to Johnson’s efforts, by 1971, for the first time, government spent more on welfare than defence. Between 1949 and 1979, defence costs rose ten times (from $11.5 billion to $114.5 billion) but remained roughly 4–5 per cent of
GNP
. But welfare spending rose twenty-five times, from $10.6 billion to $259 billion, its share of the budget
went up to more than half, and the proportion of the
GNP
it absorbed tripled to nearly 12 per cent.
¹⁰⁴

This momentous change in the fundamental purpose and cost of American central government began to impose growing strains even before Johnson ceased to be president. By that stage, the government’s slice of the
GNP
had risen from 28.7 per cent under Eisenhower to 33.4 per cent. Treasury control disintegrated. Under Eisenhower, the very efficient Bureau of the Budget (as it was called up to 1970) operated as Harding had conceived it: as an objective agency, rather like a court of law, to supervise all spending. Under Kennedy, characteristically, the Office was politicized and under Johnson it became activist: the Budget Director had to share big-spending values.
¹⁰⁵
Moreover, though Congress would vote for the programmes, it was much less willing to provide the taxes to pay for them. Johnson quarrelled bitterly with the House finance-boss, Wilbur Mills, and the Republican leader Gerald Ford. Unable to get the taxes, he printed money. His fear of inflation and his inability to cope with it was a hidden factor in his decision to leave public life in 1968. ‘I told [Mills] that whether he realized it or not, the country’s economy was about to go down the drain.’
¹⁰⁶

By that time some of Johnson’s own illusions about the virtues of big spending had been undermined. It was no longer clear to him that the results justified the damaging impact on the economy. The most important one, and certainly the most permanent, was unintentional: the government’s share of all workers doubled and by 1976 one in six (over 13 million) was directly on Washington’s payroll. But the beneficiaries of this shift were overwhelmingly middle class. Johnson claimed that, during his time in office, of the 35 million ‘trapped in poverty’ in 1964, he ‘lifted out’ 12.4 million or almost 36 per cent.
¹⁰⁷
But this was only one way of looking at the statistics. As living standards rose, the definition of poverty changed, and the poor ‘felt’ just as poor as before, though their real incomes had risen. The danger of the kind of welfare state Johnson was creating was that it pushed people out of the productive economy permanently and made them dependents of the state. Poverty increased when families split up, either by old people living apart or by divorce, with consequent divisions of income.
¹⁰⁸
Legislation often promoted these processes. It emerged that perhaps the biggest single cause of poverty in the USA was the instability of black marriages. Daniel P.Moynihan, Johnson’s Assistant-Secretary of Labour, argued in the
Moynihan Report
(March 1965) that half the black population suffered from a ‘social pathology’ whose source was the black family, where husbands deserted wives and children in distressingly large numbers. The object of policy should be ‘the establishment of a stable family structure’.
¹⁰⁹
But the poverty war did not do this. It did the opposite, for often the structure of welfare
provision made it pay for a poor family to split up. By the time Johnson was ready to quit, Moynihan was arguing that the whole poverty programme was misconceived and ill-directed.
¹¹⁰