What’s a prez to do? Lyndon Johnson and Vietnam

Lyndon Johnson had long dreamed of this. The tall, skinny kid with big ears from the Texas Hill Country had entered politics out of college, just in time to see Franklin Roosevelt elected in 1932. Roosevelt became Johnson’s hero, the model of what a political leader could accomplish for the good of the American people. Johnson helped Roosevelt bring electricity to the Hill Country, in the process discovering in himself traits that made him think he too could be president one day.

He climbed the ladder of politics, winning election to the Senate in 1948 and then the post of Senate majority leader. During the 1950s he was part of the Texas troika running the country: Johnson, House speaker Sam Rayburn, and President Dwight Eisenhower, who had been born in Texas before growing up in Kansas.

He lost the Democratic nomination for president to John Kennedy, but Kennedy turned around and asked Johnson to join the ticket in the vice-presidential slot. Kennedy’s gesture was possibly pro forma, offered in the expectation that Johnson would prefer to keep running the Senate. But Johnson said yes. He delivered the twenty-four electors of Texas, who were crucial to Kennedy’s victory. Three years later, Kennedy was assassinated. Johnson was president.

His dreams of the presidency had always focused on domestic affairs. He would be the president to drag the South into the twentieth century on race. He would extend and consolidate the New Deal, adding health care, education, housing, the environment and a dozen other items to the list of federal responsibilities. He would call his program the Great Society.

His dreams did not include foreign affairs. Johnson considered foreign affairs a distraction from the central work of a president: the improvement of life in America. As president he couldn’t ignore the world entirely, but he begrudged every hour it stole from tending to the concerns of Americans at home.

Vietnam was the biggest distractor in the eighteen months after Johnson became president. The war of anticommunist South Vietnam and the United States against communist North Vietnam and its South Vietnamese allies, the Viet Cong, was going badly. Johnson’s generals told him they needed more troops—a lot more troops—to keep the communists at bay.

Johnson hadn’t trained for this kind of decision. He didn’t know whether to believe the generals. Did they need as many troops as they were requesting? Were they setting him up for blame in case things in Vietnam got worse? Johnson realized he was out of his depth.

He was on surer ground regarding the politics of escalation in Vietnam. He had been in Congress during World War II. He saw how the war sucked the air out of domestic reform. Johnson knew that if he went all in on Vietnam, the way the generals wanted, his Great Society might die in the cradle. At the same time, he couldn’t afford to lose Vietnam. He had been in the Senate when communists in China gained control of that country, and he saw how Republicans had blamed Harry Truman and killed his Fair Deal, intended as a postwar revival of the New Deal.

Either way, Johnson needed to keep Vietnam from becoming the major issue of his presidency. His 1964 election provided him his own mandate, his pile of political capital. He’d been in politics long enough to know that political capital starts to dwindle the day after the election. He was determined to spend his pile accomplishing the domestic reforms he’d eyed for decades. It might last two years, tops, given the ambition of his agenda. But if Vietnam blew up, it would vanish overnight. He wasn’t going to let that happen.

He decided to give the generals some of what they wanted, but not all. He agreed to send sufficient troops to keep South Vietnam from collapsing, but not enough to win the war—if that was even possible. He wasn’t convinced it was. Johnson had seen Truman try for victory in Korea, only to have the effort draw in China. Johnson refused to afford China reason to enter the war in Vietnam the way it had entered the Korean war. Johnson would hold the line in Vietnam. That would be all. That would be enough.

Johnson’s strategy worked, for a time. His cautious escalation kept the war from derailing the Great Society. Reform after reform, program after program, Johnson compiled a domestic record that outdid the New Deal in many respects. The kid from Texas had surpassed his hero in what mattered to him most.

But the line Johnson drew in Vietnam couldn’t hold forever. In early 1968 the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong launched an offensive on the lunar new year, Tet, that rocked American and South Vietnamese forces back on their heels. The Americans and South Vietnamese counterattacked and recaptured the ground lost, inflicting heavy damage on the communists.

But the Tet offensive took a toll on Johnson. He and his administration had put an optimistic face on the situation in Vietnam, with some professing to see an imminent end to the war. The Tet offensive revealed that any acceptable end was far off. Critics of the administration’s war policy grew louder. Johnson himself was deflated. To the surprise of the nation, he announced that he would neither seek nor accept the Democratic nomination for president in 1968. Instead he would devote all his time and energy to the pursuit of an honorable conclusion to the war.

It was too late—too late for him, and probably too late for the United States and South Vietnam. Peace talks commenced but went nowhere. Richard Nixon succeeded Johnson and adopted a new strategy: of withdrawing American troops while escalating American bombing of North Vietnam. It didn’t work either. A peace accord was signed in early 1973. But the communists resumed the war in 1975 and quickly overran what remained of South Vietnamese defenses.

In retirement Johnson reflected on the choice he had made. “I knew from the start that I was bound to be crucified either way I moved,” he said. “If I left the woman I really loved—the Great Society—in order to get involved with that bitch of a war on the other side of the world, then I would lose everything at home. All my programs. All my hopes to feed the hungry and shelter the homeless. All my dreams to provide education and medical care to the browns and the blacks and the lame and the poor. But if I left that war and let the communists take over South Vietnam, then I would be seen as a coward and my nation would be seen as an appeaser, and we would both find it impossible to accomplish anything for anybody anywhere on the entire globe.”

He didn’t abandon his true love. The Great Society took shape largely as he desired. But neither did he break things off with Vietnam. Victory there might never have been in the cards, but Johnson’s middle-way approach made it impossible and made defeat more painful than it need have been.