The Best and the Brightest (117 page)

There was of course a special irony in this because Fortas had gone to the Court, where he was not supposed to be involved in politics or consult with the executive branch at all, and he had by means of a classic Johnsonian maneuver replaced Arthur Goldberg, who had left the Court precisely because he was somewhat restless with the judiciary and the lack of political action there. Goldberg had been making noises about his own restlessness just before the death of Stevenson, and after Stevenson’s death, John Kenneth Galbraith would return to his home to find a message to call the President. Galbraith, shrewd in the ways of both power and Lyndon Johnson, realized immediately what Johnson was after, a good Kennedy liberal name for window dressing to succeed Stevenson at the UN; it was not an assignment Galbraith sought, a forum of limitless debate where everyone else tended to speak almost as much as Galbraith, but he realized that if he turned it down, he had better have another name for the President. Thus Galbraith thought of the itchy Goldberg and passed on the name to Johnson, noting that Goldberg seemed to want more action. The President was delighted, it was even better than Galbraith, it cleared Goldberg from the Jewish seat of the Court and opened it up for Fortas, and at the same time, by sending Goldberg to New York, created a potential rival to Senator Robert Kennedy. Within minutes Goldberg was summoned to the White House. Arthur, the President said, the next man who sits in this seat is the man who brings peace in Vietnam. Goldberg nodded. It’s the most important job there is, it demands the best man available and I want you to help your President. I want you to go to the UN and make peace. Which was followed with a long and full enunciation of Goldberg’s unique qualifications to bring peace, with Goldberg still nodding.

So he left the Court to go to the United Nations, where he did not bring peace, where he found that he had effectively pulled himself out of the action and the decision making, where he was being used to make the case for a policy about which he had constantly mounting doubts, where he would destroy much of his hard-earned and justly deserved reputation as a humane liberal, and where, most galling of all, he would watch the man who replaced him on the Court play a genuine role on the decision making in Vietnam. (However, in July, Goldberg would argue vehemently against calling up the reserves, and when Johnson decided against doing it, against going on a real wartime footing, Goldberg would take some satisfaction that he had played a role here. Probably the reverse is true, that Johnson never intended to call up the reserves, and was delighted to have the case made against the obvious signs of war, such as a reserve call-up.)

So Johnson made his decision; it was, he thought, a personal challenge from Ho. If Ho wanted a challenge, a test of will, then he had come to the right man. Lyndon Johnson of Texas would not be pushed around, he would not try to negotiate with Ho and those others, as he said, walking in the streets of Saigon. He was a man to stand tall when the pressure was there. To be counted. He would show Ho his mettle, show the toughness of this country, and then they could talk. Rusk agreed; this was one democracy that was not going to show itself weak, it had the right leader (later during the Glassboro meetings with the Soviet leadership, Karl Mundt, as conservative a senator as could be found, was appalled to find that the Soviet Union’s Kosygin did not have the kind of power to go to war that Johnson seemed to have). Johnson would not shirk from this test of wills. Besides, it was above all a political decision and a domestic one at that; it was a question of how he read the country, and when he found doubters on his own staff, some of the younger people, he would tell them, You boys don’t understand, you don’t know the relationship between the Congress and Asia. It was an emotional thing; they had never seen it because during their political lifetime it had been bottled up, but it was still there. He would lose his presidential possibilities, he said, if Ho were running through the streets of Saigon. Listen, he added, Truman and Acheson had never been effective from the time of the fall of China. Lyndon Johnson had a mandate for the moment. But this way if he failed on Vietnam it would be done quickly. McNamara and Bundy seemed to be saying it could be done quickly, perhaps in six months, perhaps a little more. And the test cases were also quick. The Cuban missile crisis had gone quickly and that was a dry run for it, and the Dominican Republic, hell, he had sent a few troops in there and he had put out the fire in a few days. Hardly a shot fired. Look what had happened in the Dominican, when American boys had gone ashore. So this one would be quick too. Just give him six months. Of course, six months later he would be unmovable, too deeply involved in something that was going badly to talk rationally. It was one more sad aspect of Lyndon Johnson that there was the quality of the bully, and the reverse quality as well; he was, at his best, most open, most candid, most easy to reach, most accessible when things were going well, but when things went poorly, as they were bound to on Vietnam, he became impossible to reach and talk to. His greatest flexibility and rationality on the subject came before he had dispatched the first bombers and the first troops; from then on it would all be downhill. Doubters would no longer be friendly doubters, they would be critics and soon enemies; and worse, soon after that, traitors. There was no way to reach him, to enter his chamber, to gain his ear, other than to pledge total loyalty. Only one man would be able to change him, to dissent and retain his respect—and even that was a tenuous balancing act which virtually destroyed one of his oldest friendships, and that was Clark Clifford in 1968.

So, cornered, he would go ahead. He was not just reading their country, which was small, Asian, fourth-rate, bereft of bombers and helicopters; he was above all a political animal and he was reading his
own
country and in that he may have misread it; he read the politics of the past rather than the
potential
politics of the country, which his very victory of 1964 illuminated. (He had won as a peace candidate, and it is likely that had a new China policy been openly debated, with Johnson in favor of it and Goldwater opposing, it might have enlarged his margin; at the least it would have had little negative effect, probably would not have cut into his margin in any appreciable sense, and would have liberated him from one of the dominating myths of the past. But as the issue had been dormant by both liberal and conservative consent for a decade—the liberals giving consent, the conservatives owning the policy—there was no desire to change it.) The Democrats, who had been hurt by the issue in the past, were quite content to keep it bottled up. As was Johnson, a good and traditional liberal who was also a man of the fifties and of Texas in the fifties, where McCarthyism had been particularly virulent, an era of potentially monolithic Communism, where the fewer questions about how monolithic it was, the better.

Those fears and suspicions of the Communists had never entirely left him; he was capable of wanting conciliation with the Soviet Union and holding the most basic kind of distrust of the Russians. The fact that the Vietcong attack took place while Kosygin was in Hanoi had a particularly negative effect on Lyndon Johnson. The Russians were not to be trusted, he would repeat to aides, they broke treaties and lied. Andrei Gromyko had come right in and lied to Jack Kennedy during the missile crisis; that had made a deep impression on Johnson. He would kid the White House people, particularly Bundy, about their friendships with Ambassador Dobrynin, teasing Bundy, “He’s trying to slip Dobrynin in here just like he slipped Gromyko in here,” and then adding, quite seriously, “You can never know about a man like Dobrynin.” You had to watch those Russians. The Kosygin visit to Hanoi was, in his view, somehow quite sinister, despite the warnings at State that it might be the North Vietnamese’s way of showing the Soviets that they would not be controlled. It played on his darker vision of the Russians and convinced him that Kosygin was out there stirring up something.

The forces at work in the fifties were very real to him. If Jack Kennedy was a man who knew more about where the sixties were headed but whose intellect preceded his courage, who stepped forward gingerly, then Johnson was far more a man of the past. He reacted to what he thought the country was; the country which had twice defeated Stevenson for the Presidency, where the powerful people on the Hill seemed primarily to be hawks, where the dominant figures of journalism were proud survivors of the worst of the Cold War, and where American universities had also given willingly, too willingly, in fact, of their talents and support to the Cold War. He did not see the new generation coming up, that the changing demography would become a major political factor, that there were new forces coming up quickly which were right below the surface, forces loosed by change, media change, economic change, demographic change, birth control and sexual change, change wrought here by change in the Communist world, the self-evident split between the Russians and the Chinese. All of this would challenge the existing order in politics, journalism, the universities. The new forces would coalesce with forces which had been around since the Stevenson days and which would have a major political impact. It would turn out that the Cold War generation’s control was very shaky indeed, and that the entry of the new forces into American political life would be very much accelerated by Johnson’s own entry into the war. They would never, even under the best and sunniest days of the Great Society, be people and forces much at ease with him, it was all moving too quickly for that, but his very entry into the Vietnam war would catalyze them and give them muscle previously missing. The forces of peace in 1965 were thin and scattered, timid in challenging the accepted Cold War attitudes; three years later they were massive and audacious, powerful enough to unseat one President, to bring a tie vote in the Senate on a weapons system (the ABM), an unheard-of thing, and powerful enough to make military spending a major domestic issue.

That would all come later; perhaps another politician might have sensed it, if not clearly identifying the change. But Lyndon Johnson did not sense it, rather he sensed he had position on everybody else, he had control of the center, he had moved all opponents to the extreme. He had handled the Congress, signed it on without really signing it on; he had handled the press by slicing the salami in pieces so thin that they were never able to pin him down, and he had handled Ho by making it seem as if Ho were attacking him at Tonkin. He was using force but using it discreetly, and he was also handling the military. They were moving toward war, but in such imperceptible degrees that neither the Congress nor the press could ever show a quantum jump. All the decisions were being cleverly hidden; he was cutting it thin to hold off opposition.

If there were no decisions which were crystallized and hard, then they could not leak, and if they could not leak, then the opposition could not point to them. Which was why he was not about to call up the reserves, because the use of the reserves would blow it all. It would be self-evident that we were really going to war, and that we would in fact have to pay a price. Which went against all the Administration planning: this would be a war without a price, a silent, politically invisible war. The military wanted to call up the reserves, and their planning always included a reserve call-up, usually in the nature of 200,000 men (certain specialized units such as engineer battalions and prisoner-of-war specialty units), and Johnson did not discourage them. He seemed to be telling them that yes, they would get the reserves, that this beautiful military machine which Bob McNamara had put together would not be raped for that little fourth-rate country. And he seemed to encourage McNamara to think that there would be a reserve call-up, encouraging him to fight for them and ask for them, so that in the final climactic week in July, McNamara went before one of the larger NSC meetings arguing for the reserves, and then at the end Johnson said no, there would not be a reserve call-up, he would not go that far. But having held the line against McNamara, having let him build the case so strongly in front of his peers, he realized he had set an ambush, and as they walked out of the room Johnson turned to one of his aides, winked, pointed to McNamara and asked, “Think we’ll get a resignation out of him?” But then, because he realized he might have hurt McNamara, that he might have felt that he had been misled, he sent a helicopter by and the McNamaras were taken to Camp David for dinner. A social evening, after all. No one left with hurt feelings. Knock them down and then pick them up.

He was against a call-up of the reserves for other reasons as well. It would, he thought, telegraph the wrong signals to the adversaries, particularly China and the Soviet Union (frighten them into the idea that this was a real war) and Hanoi, which might decide that it was going to be a long war (he did not intend to go into a long war, and he felt if you called up the reserves you had to be prepared to go the distance and you might force your adversary to do the same). He also felt that it would frighten the country, and he had just run as a peace candidate; similarly, he felt it would be too much of a sign that the military were in charge and that the civilians would turn over too much responsibility to the military. Finally, and above all, he feared that it would cost him the Great Society, that his enemies in Congress would seize on the war as a means of denying him his social legislation. It was his oft-repeated theme, that his enemies were lying in wait to steal his Great Society. Oh no, they wouldn’t confront it directly, they were afraid of being against the poor, but they would seize on the war as a means of crippling him. He was always a man who could believe in two very sharply conflicting sides of a question, and he could, right in the middle of a hard-line discussion, change and say that he, Lyndon Johnson, had the most to lose if we went to war. He would interrupt his pro-war monologue and switch sides, saying that they might throw him out of office, he might lose the Great Society. Those people out there, he would say, don’t want to go to war. They don’t want war in Vietnam, they want the good things in life. And then, mercurially, he was back, planning for the war, talking about slipping his hand up Ho Chi Minh’s leg before Ho even knew it.