The Kennedy Half-Century (56 page)

Of course, the Johnson White House could not control the media coverage, which naturally mentioned the events of four years prior, nor could it stanch the flow of emotions among the citizenry, which inevitably understood that
John Kennedy would probably have been beginning his second term save for November 22. The reminders were everywhere. While Mrs. Kennedy understandably did not attend the inaugural ceremonies, two Senators Kennedy were now on the inaugural platform, Ted representing Massachusetts and Bobby newly elected from New York.
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Moreover, nine of JFK’s cabinet officers (out of eleven slots) continued serving Johnson as he began his elective term.
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The principals included Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, Secretary of the Treasury C. Douglas Dillon, Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall, and United Nations Ambassador Adlai Stevenson.
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The Kennedys were not the only interesting omission in LBJ’s inaugural speech. The growing American involvement in Vietnam was also ignored. For all of Johnson’s achievements in the four years to come, no other matters would so dominate his presidency as the Kennedy name and the Vietnam War. The combination would prove lethal to LBJ’s hopes for a lengthier White House stay.

These were faraway drums in January of 1965. Johnson set to work pushing the massively Democratic Congress for a laundry list of new programs and policies. He still had his magic touch on Capitol Hill, with an intimate understanding of the legislative process, and the strengths and weaknesses of virtually every legislator. CBS’s Bob Schieffer, who watched his fellow Texan closely, tells a story that illustrates the effectiveness of the fabled “Johnson treatment.” When Schieffer’s friend Bill Stuckey (heir to the Stuckey’s restaurant empire) won election to the House in Georgia’s eighth district, LBJ called Stuckey at home and insisted that he come to the White House right away. “They sent a government airplane down there,” Schieffer recalls. “Bill got on the airplane. He flew to Andrews Air Force Base. The White House helicopter was waiting, which took him directly to the South Lawn of the White House. He landed on the South Lawn. An aide met him at the helicopter door and took him directly into the Oval Office and there stood the President of the United States who put his arm around him and said, ‘Son, I’m really going to need your help.’ Bill told me he never once voted against Lyndon Johnson.”
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The Kennedy legacy also helped LBJ muscle his grand schemes through the House and Senate. The new Congress was responding less to the wave of public sympathy for the party’s goals that followed the assassination and had driven the prior year’s legislation. Rather, the 1965 legislature was akin to FDR’s first, swollen with party adherents who wanted to rubber-stamp just about anything the president sent down from the White House. Both the 1964 and 1965 sessions were part of JFK’s bequest—the first a visceral reaction and a direct consequence of November 22, the second an aftershock. Never in American history has grief over a presidential death so shaped the statute
books. There was no such precedent after Lincoln’s murder, nor following the deaths of Harrison, Garfield, McKinley, Harding, and even Franklin Roosevelt. (There was considerable congressional action post-Lincoln, but Congress wrested control of the agenda from a weak presidential successor and enacted stringent Reconstruction laws that Lincoln likely would have avoided.)
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Lyndon Johnson probably thought little about the tunnel of history or John Kennedy’s role in his success as he signed a torrent of legislation in 1965, including the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, providing the first substantial federal assistance to schools across the nation, and the Higher Education Act;
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the groundbreaking Medicare bill, sought first by President Truman and brought to life in his presence in Independence, Missouri;
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the Voting Rights Act, which empowered the federal government to oversee voter registration in states and localities with a history of racial discrimination as well as outlawing literacy tests used to limit the franchise;
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the founding of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and the appointment of its secretary, the first African American in any cabinet, Robert Weaver;
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and major pieces of environmental legislation, the Water Quality Act and the Highway Beautification Act (the latter, Lady Bird Johnson’s pet project).
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In later years, LBJ added to his breathtaking record of legislative triumphs with the Public Broadcasting Act that led to the creation of the Public Broadcasting Service and National Public Radio;
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the establishment of the Product Safety Commission;
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the Air Quality Act;
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the Land and Water Conservation Fund Act;
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and the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, and the National Trails Systems Act.
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Many of these advances in education, senior citizen health care, and protection of the environment are taken for granted today as part of the national fabric, but they were revolutionary in their time.

Perhaps the Johnson presidency should be more closely associated in the public mind with these achievements than it is, but for those who lived through LBJ’s five years in the White House, one subject dominates all others: Vietnam. And it is not to Johnson’s benefit.

Johnson was not the first president to make bad decisions about Vietnam—Eisenhower and Kennedy deserve some blame—nor was he the last, as Nixon would show.
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But Johnson was unquestionably the chief executive who took Vietnam from back-burner involvement and made it the whole stove. When LBJ succeeded Kennedy, there were 16,300 troops and advisers in Vietnam; when he left, there were more than 535,000.
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Early in Johnson’s administration there was close to a consensus that America needed to continue the fight against Communism by helping South
Vietnam, although people differed about the precise means. Some members of the press corps were among the most enthusiastic cheerleaders of decisive action in Southeast Asia. Before Lyndon Johnson even took the oath for a full presidential term, he found the influential columnist Joseph Alsop all but questioning his manhood. Alsop compared LBJ unfavorably to JFK during the Cuban Missile Crisis: “If Mr. Johnson ducks the challenge [in Vietnam] we shall learn by experience about what it would have been like if Kennedy had ducked the challenge in October 1962.”
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White House staffers reported that Johnson was furious. Within weeks he had decided to pursue a tough policy against the Communist North Vietnamese, and he gradually committed Marines to the protection of an air base in Danang. First, they were allowed only defensive operations, then offensive, then more divisions were sent, then two Army brigades. In July 1965 came the next major escalation, with the number of GIs in Vietnam increased from 75,000 to 125,000. The die was cast. So, too, was the reaction, which escalated along with the troops. Twenty college campuses and a hundred other communities across America witnessed their first major anti-Vietnam protests in October 1965.
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By 1967 President Johnson had sent an astounding number of American troops to Vietnam—close to a half million—and the bombing in Indochina had already been so massive that the United States had dropped more tonnage of explosives there than on all of Europe and Asia during World War II.
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By the spring of 1967, antiwar demonstrations were widespread—not just at colleges but in cities large and small throughout the nation. In October more than fifty thousand marched on the Pentagon to insist on an end to the Vietnam conflict. Everywhere LBJ went, he was met by increasingly vociferous protestors, who often chanted, “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?” At the end of 1967, American casualties numbered 19,560 dead and many thousands more wounded.
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Television evening news reported the fighting daily, and at week’s end contained the grim and growing body count (as well as fantastical U.S.government-supplied estimates of North Vietnamese and Viet Cong troops supposedly killed, which viewers increasingly disbelieved).
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In May 1967, aide Harry McPherson sent a somber memo to Johnson, quoting his wife as saying, “The President never goes anywhere anymore—in America. I feel as if he’s a prisoner in the White House.”
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Indeed, LBJ was serving a kind of incarceration, no doubt preferred by the Secret Service given Johnson’s low ratings and the intense animus directed at him from the antiwar left. The right wing had also never forgiven Johnson for his civil rights legislation. LBJ achieved the rare status of being hated about equally by both sides of the ideological spectrum.

Partly because of the emergence of Bobby Kennedy as Johnson’s premier
rival, LBJ and his staff began an unsubtle effort to blame President Kennedy for their Vietnam travails. Johnson was urged to remind the press and public that he was following Kennedy’s Vietnam policy, and that JFK had supported the “domino theory”—the belief that if South Vietnam fell, the Communists would succeed in conquering (or at least be emboldened to attempt revolution in) other Southeast Asia countries, not to mention Central and South America. Columnist Joseph Alsop recalled that Johnson “was not very gracefully telling everyone at that time that his was, so to say, a world he’d never made; that he’d inherited this mess from President Kennedy; that it was all President Kennedy’s fault, not his fault; and that if we encountered disaster there it would be President Kennedy’s disaster, not his disaster.”
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As former president Johnson explained it to the historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, it was his determination to carry out JFK’s pledge to save Vietnam—and fear of what Bobby Kennedy and other Kennedy backers might say if he didn’t—that produced the whole morass:

[I]f we lost Vietnam … there would be Robert Kennedy out in front leading the fight against me, telling everyone that I had betrayed John Kennedy’s commitment to South Vietnam. That I had let a democracy fall into the hands of the Communists. That I was a coward. An unmanly man. A man without a spine. Oh, I could see it coming all right.
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Johnson’s very personal interpretation that his “manhood” was at stake requires a psychologist rather than a political scientist to interpret. But LBJ’s other deep insecurities and resentments toward the Kennedy clan and their Ivy League supporters are easy to fathom:

[T]here were all those liberals on the Hill squawking at me about Vietnam. Why? Because I never went to Harvard. That’s why. Because I wasn’t John F. Kennedy. Because I wasn’t friends with all their friends. Because I was keeping the throne from Bobby Kennedy. Because the Great Society was accomplishing more than the New Frontier. You see, they had to find some issue on which to turn against me and they found it in Vietnam. Even though they were the very people who developed the concept of limited war in the first place.
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No one will ever know how John F. Kennedy would have handled the Vietnam challenge had he lived, though that has not stopped a battalion of historians, JFK aides, and others from trying to divine it.
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President Johnson was correct to say that his predecessor had set the course in Southeast Asia, and
those who claim that all would have been sweetness and light on Vietnam in a second Kennedy administration are blind to reality. Yet JFK and LBJ could not have been more different as people or presidents. Kennedy’s strength was foreign affairs, given his family upbringing, life in Great Britain, intellectual interests, and World War II service; Johnson’s expertise was mainly domestic. In the crucible of the Oval Office, Kennedy had learned from the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis not to rely overly on the advice of the military; Johnson was far more deferential. And perhaps most of all, the Ivy League Kennedy’s premier base was among the academics at universities; Johnson, always a bit suspicious and perhaps envious of intellectuals, was more at home among hardscrabble Democrats and Capitol Hill politicians.

Given the existence of the military draft and the left-leaning views of most faculty, the first and most vociferous opposition to the Vietnam War naturally emerged from the campuses, locus of JFK’s ardent supporters. It is difficult to believe that John Kennedy would have risked his political foundation by pursuing a years-long, highly unpopular war in Vietnam, or ever escalated it to the top of his agenda as LBJ did, and without the Vietnam War, the country would have gone down a very different path in the 1960s and beyond. At the very least, it is difficult to imagine Richard Nixon as Kennedy’s successor in 1969—another profound reason why November 22, 1963, had such a wide-ranging effect on modern American history.

JFK’s counselor Theodore Sorensen could be expected to defend his president, yet it is difficult to deny the essence of his argument:

Some historians make too much of the fact that [Johnson’s] advisers on that war had been Kennedy’s. JFK had more judgment and international experience than LBJ, better positioning him to evaluate and reject some of that advice. [Kennedy] had in fact rejected the repeated advice that he send combat troop divisions to South Vietnam and bomb North Vietnam, the very actions that LBJ took, stimulated by a fake crisis in the Gulf of Tonkin … I refuse to agree with LBJ’s whine … that it was all Kennedy’s fault. Johnson’s major failure to win the confidence of black and student rioters cannot be traced back to JFK; he had their confidence. [And] JFK was already beginning the withdrawal of the military advisers he had increased in order to reinforce Eisenhower’s original commitment.
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