They Marched Into Sunlight (33 page)

“Victor Riesel, a labor columnist, said you would win by a bigger margin next year than you did before,” Rusk noted.

“What I really want to know,” Johnson said, “is the effect of the announcement—what we say if we do decide that way, and the timing of it.”

“Of course, there would be no worry about money and men,” McNamara said. “We could get support for that. I do not know about the psychology in the country, the effect on the morale of the men, and the effect on Hanoi. I do think that they would not negotiate under any circumstances and they would wait for the 1968 elections.”

The same group, minus Helms, met again on October 4. There was no talk about Johnson’s future this time, only hard words about North Vietnam and negotiations and bombs. Two messages had come in from the Kissinger contact, generating confusion about Hanoi’s intentions. The first message quoted Mai Van Bo as saying that a cessation of bombing would elicit “a solemn engagement to talk.” That line was missing from the second message. “They are still weaseling on us,” Rusk concluded.

Johnson was in a bombs-away mood. He wanted to bomb everything right up to the edge of Hanoi, he said. “I know this bombing must be hurting them. Despite any reports to the contrary. I can feel it in my bones…. We need to pour the steel on. Let’s hit them every day and go every place except Hanoi.”

D
OUGLASS
C
ATER,
another White House aide, had what he called his “bi-monthly clash” at lunch with James (Scotty) Reston of the
New York Times
that day. He began by reading from Reston’s latest column, which accused LBJ of addressing “the politics rather than the policy of the problems” in Vietnam. This was “bad history and bad analysis,” Cater lectured Reston. He said the columnist might understand how wayward his thinking was if he read Bruce Catton’s
Terrible Swift Sword.
That book, as Cater described it in a memorandum to President Johnson, “recounts the misguided criticisms of Horace Greeley, the Scotty Reston of his day, against Lincoln during the awful middle years of the Civil War.”

Reston “lamented the spectacle we were creating throughout the world of an idealistic nation that was coming more and more to rely on pure power.” Cater answered that there was a “certain amount of hypocrisy in the public position of foreign political leaders,” who for the most part were “not really so critical in private.” Reston then took “a different turn in the argument by asking what we really hoped to accomplish in Vietnam. We were committed to get out within six months of a settlement. Obviously, we would never go back in if trouble flared again. What would all the death and suffering have accomplished?”

A few days later White House officials picked up early word of another development in the journalism world more problematic than a Scotty Reston column.
Life
magazine, once a pillar of establishment support for the war, was preparing an October editorial calling on the Johnson administration to stop bombing North Vietnam and negotiate a peace settlement. Henry Luce, founding editor of Time-Life, had died earlier in 1967, and his death had coincided with a significant shift in his magazine empire’s view of the world in general and Vietnam in particular. Hedley Donovan, the new editor of Time-Life publications, had returned from Vietnam that year rethinking his support and talking about journalists who ought to consider “saying out loud that they were wrong about the war.” That is precisely what the editorial would do. In
Life
’s revised view, the United States had gone into Vietnam “for honorable and sensible purposes,” but the task “proved to be harder, longer, and more complicated than had been foreseen” and it was no longer vital enough “to ask young Americans to die for.”

The liberal
Times
was one thing, a dovish
Life
quite another. News of the imminent antiwar editorial heightened the siege atmosphere at the White House.

During that second week in October, newspapers in New York and Washington were presenting the latest analysis from General Giap, which stirred more controversy. Americans tended to think that Vo Nguyen Giap was the unchallenged voice of the North Vietnamese military, but that was a misreading. Sick for much of the summer and early fall of 1967, he had spent weeks at a time in Hungary, recovering from a heart ailment. Hanoi’s military planning for the next year was being done largely without him and even at times against his advice. But what he had to say, internally or for world consumption, still carried great weight. Giap too was now declaring the war a stalemate, according to a CIA translation of a lengthy assessment he wrote for the North Vietnamese Armed Forces newspaper. And a stalemate meant that eventually his side would win. No matter how many troops the United States sent to Vietnam, the stalemate would persist. The Americans were unlikely to invade the North, he suggested, because that would only further dilute their forces and run the risk of bringing China into the conflict. His side would outlast the Americans in a protracted war. America did not have the stomach for it, he said, especially with so many people in the United States already opposed to the military intervention in Vietnam. In the second-to-last paragraph of the
New York Times
story, Giap was said to have called the antiwar movement in the United States “a valuable mark of sympathy.”

This last comment did not signify anything new. The antiwar movement had been praised in Liberation Radio broadcasts and propaganda from Hanoi since the troop buildup began in 1965. As the war continued, the peace movement in the United States became an increasingly important factor in the strategy of the National Liberation Front and the politicians in Hanoi. At provincial meetings during the summer of 1967, local Viet Cong officials had been lectured on the details of Resolution 13, a measure adopted by the North Vietnamese Communist party (Lao Dong) that “mentioned antiwar sentiment in the U.S.” and “dissension between hawks and doves and between negroes and whites.” According to an American intelligence report based on captured documents and prisoner interrogations, “the stated VC policy was that the longer the war continued, the stronger the U.S. doves would become and the Viet Cong were therefore dedicated to fight at least until the 1968 presidential election.” The prevailing view in Hanoi was that the Johnson administration was “losing prestige” and that LBJ might “lose to a dove candidate.”

All of this, but especially Giap’s assertion that the antiwar movement was valuable to his side, provoked a vitriolic congressional debate about the meaning of wartime dissent. Speaker John W. McCormack, an old-line Johnson loyalist, strode to the well of the House on October 11 with a copy of the
Times
rolled in his hand and angrily pounded the table with it as he denounced critics of the American war effort. “If I was one of those, my conscience would disturb me the rest of my life,” McCormack said. He followed with an obligatory homage to freedom of speech that served as a rhetorical bridge to further denunciation of outspoken doves: “Nobody argues with the right to dissent. But if I had an opinion that I thought would be adverse to the interests of my country, I would withhold it.” A hundred congressmen rose to a standing ovation in the House chamber and bathed their old speaker in thunderous applause. His attack was seconded by another party loyalist, Emanuel Celler of New York, who said that Johnson’s detractors “wear their criticism as if it was a badge of intellectual superiority.”

In the Senate, Republican minority leader Everett McKinley Dirksen had launched a vigorous bipartisan defense of President Johnson a few days earlier. “He has a little stronger chemical in his system than others,” explained Dean Rusk, when Johnson wondered aloud at a meeting of his war council how the hoarse-throated septuagenarian Illinois senator could “stand up and be my defender the way he has been.” The first line of Dirksen’s defense was to challenge the president’s critics, saying they had gone beyond “due bounds.” Dirksen was talking primarily not about liberal Democrats, and certainly not about activist students, but rather was aiming at moderate members of his own party who had turned against the war, senators like Charles Percy, his Illinois colleague, Thurston B. Morton of Kentucky, and Clifford P. Case of New Jersey.

Dissent, Case responded, was not only within due bounds, it was vital to democracy. “Just as it was proper for the Senator from Illinois to call to the attention of us our responsibility not to weaken the cause of our nation, the cause of freedom in the world, so I think it is equally important for all of us to meet our responsibility, when we disagree with the conduct of affairs by our government, to state that disagreement as clearly and distinctly as possible, whether in time of peace or in time of war.” One of the lead critics on the Democratic side, Senator J. W. Fulbright of Arkansas, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said the hostile atmosphere was not caused by the war’s opponents but by the war itself, which had created “an unhealthy atmosphere of suspicion and recrimination.” And it was the war, Fulbright argued, that was threatening to turn LBJ’s Great Society into a sick society.

Vietnam consumed Congress no less than the White House in those days of October. Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield of Montana, a moderate Democrat who was universally respected as he operated in the space between his president and antiwar liberals in his party, was now pushing hard for a United Nations role in peace negotiations, a concept that had the support of at least thirty senators. Senator George McGovern of South Dakota (whose daughter Susan was in Madison, a senior at the University of Wisconsin) sent a memorandum to the White House on October 12 in which he urged the president to halt the bombing of North Vietnam indefinitely and tell Saigon that “we now expect them to assume a greater burden of responsibility for the conduct of this war and for securing negotiations to end it.” McGovern also offered some military advice that related directly to what Terry Allen and Clark Welch and their soldiers were doing in the Long Nguyen Secret Zone that week. “Recognizing that this is a struggle for people rather than territory,” McGovern wrote, “we should quietly replace the search and destroy operations with clear and hold operations in the South.”

The next day thirty members of the House sent an open letter to Johnson expressing alarm “at the increasing escalation of bombings by American planes over North Vietnam.” The bombing campaign “has been tried and has failed to accomplish its objectives,” the congressmen argued, so “the time has come” to stop it and open the way for “a reasonable and peaceful settlement of this tragic conflict.” Among those signing the letter was Robert W. Kastenmeier, whose district included Madison.

A
LL WAS AFLAME THAT
O
CTOBER.
The war, the antiwar, the fields and jungles of Vietnam, the halls of Congress, the campuses of America.
Pour the steel on,
Lyndon Johnson said.

But his battle was more than bombs and statistics. It also involved trying to make the hardest case against his enemies, real and perceived. Who were these people in the antiwar movement? What were their connections? Who was funding them? Why were they organizing a nationwide week of protests against the draft and the war, preparing to spread a fire of dissent from the recruiting station in Oakland to Bascom Hill in Madison to the mall in Washington? How could they march on the Pentagon and dare to think they could run the president out of town? Were Communists behind all this?

Some in the Johnson White House suspected they were, and the CIA had been given the clandestine mission to find out. Two months earlier, in the heat of August, the agency’s counterintelligence staff had set up a special operations group to monitor “radical students and U.S. Negro expatriates as well as travelers passing through certain select areas abroad.” Its goal was to determine the extent to which the Soviets, Chinese, and Cubans were “exploiting our domestic problems in terms of espionage and subversion.” The operation would soon take on a presumptuously descriptive code name, CHAOS. By the middle of October, the CIA had collected enough surveillance data to begin preparing a report about the international connections of the U.S. peace movement.

There was, it turned out, not much substance to the argument that antiwar groups were part of—or unwitting dupes of—a worldwide red conspiracy, though a few antiwar leaders had “close Communist associations,” and contacts between some leaders of the movement and Hanoi were “almost continuous,” the CIA determined. That September, in a well-publicized event, a group of forty American activists had met with representatives from North Vietnam and the National Liberation Front at Bratislava, Czechoslovakia. The U.S. delegation was leaderless and diverse, including academics and magazine editors along with such better-known leftist figures as old-line radical David Dellinger and SDS leader Tom Hayden. The Vietnamese representatives made it clear that they were not interested in negotiating with the U.S. government, at least not before American troops were withdrawn and the bombing of North Vietnam was permanently halted.

Phom Van Chuong, who three and a half decades later would be serving as the deputy director of the foreign relations commission of the party central committee in Hanoi, was then stationed in Prague as a youth and student representative of the NLF and attended the Bratislava meeting. He remembered that the antiwar activists gave a briefing on what “they were planning to do in America against the war—the mass mobilization and march on Washington [planned for October].” The Americans, he said, “asked a lot of questions” about the intentions of the Vietnamese and NLF, citing reports in the western press and asking “for verification.” It was clear to him that his visitors were more willing to believe the Vietnamese than what they read in their own newspapers. “The U.S. administration had talked a lot about peace and negotiations and from the Vietnam side there had been no positive response,” Chuong recalled. “So the Americans present in Bratislava asked what was the position of the NLF to a peaceful solution, and we explained our position based on national independence.” At the time, preparations were already under way for the massive Tet Offensive that would come little more than four months later, but those plans were still a fairly tightly held secret in the top echelons in Hanoi and unknown to Chuong and his comrades who dealt with the American activists.