The Wars of Watergate (3 page)

Deliver he did, and at a frenzied pace for the next six months, dazzling friends and dismaying foes. The Kennedy New Frontier program faded into memory as Johnson stamped his own Great Society brand on a breathtaking cascade of legislation. By the time of the 1964 presidential election, he had secured both the Tax Reduction and Civil Rights acts. New laws and new ideas abounded—urban mass transit, clean air, wilderness preserves, manpower retraining, and a variety of antipoverty measures. Lyndon Johnson had apparently never met a constituency he disliked.

The tax and civil rights laws appeared to assure Johnson’s historical reputation. Both had seemed hopelessly elusive during Kennedy’s short tenure; Johnson, however, moved deftly and surely through the familiar congressional jungle and emerged with his original goals largely intact. As Senate Majority Leader in the 1950s, Johnson had repeatedly frustrated his liberal allies with what seemed to them an all-too-ready acceptance of half-loaves. But not during the halcyon early days of his presidency. The tax cut, co-opted in part by Keynesians from orthodox Republican doctrine, ensured a further takeoff for the reigning prosperity. Johnson’s civil rights legislation induced a national orgy of self-congratulation and raised hopes for a new era of peaceful racial relations. The Supreme Court’s invalidation of segregation
ten years earlier at last had a legislative imprimatur and the blessing of a Southern President.

On every front, Johnson commanded and directed a succession of triumphs. The opposition—what there was of it—was in total disarray. “I am a fellow that likes small parties,” Johnson quipped, “and the Republican party is about the size I like.” The President’s power was immense, almost absolute. “He’s getting everything through the Congress but the abolition of the Republican party,” James Reston wrote in the
New York Times
, “and he hasn’t tried that yet.”

And yet, despite Johnson’s triumphs, a White House aide noted, “something was wrong, drastically wrong.” Johnson himself acknowledged that his support was “like a Western river, broad but not deep.” Kennedy loyalists nipped at the President’s heels, snickered at his Texas roots and mannerisms, claimed he was succeeding only because of sympathy for the martyred Kennedy, and, most of all, complained about something they called “style.” The Pedernales did not flow through Camelot.

For the Kennedy-Arthurians, Johnson was the Black Knight, not fit to sit at the Round Table. Their contempt was publicly apparent, and the media dutifully reflected their mood. Jack Kennedy had been a favorite of press and television reporters as he successfully charmed and wooed them, despite his Administration’s candid advocacy of news management. Mocked, even shunned, by his supposed allies, President Johnson yearned for love and acceptance from those who counted most—the people. But a wary, even hostile, media made gaining the public’s affection a formidable task. Camelot, described by a British observer as an “idiotic Tennysonian fantasy” concocted by adoring Kennedy admirers in the media, symbolized the “resentful escapism” that bedeviled Johnson.
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The President had some tattered robes that lent substance to the criticism of his detractors. His successes paradoxically reinforced all the negative images of him as a wheeler-dealer, a conniving hustler, and a manipulator cloaked in deceit and secrecy—images that had haunted Johnson pitilessly throughout his career. Questions centered on the personal fortune he and his wife had amassed during his years of public service, particularly in the government-regulated television business; his association with Billy Sol Estes, a shady entrepreneur who lavishly supported Texas politicians, including Johnson; and, most harmful of all, the corrupt dealings of his Senate aide and protégé, Bobby Baker. The President insisted he hardly knew Baker—“one of the great whoppers of American political history,” as Johnson’s former Press Secretary described it.
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The master politician could not elude the questions and innuendoes regarding his moral character. The United States’ growing involvement in Indochina was intractable and unpopular enough, but Johnson’s lack of
moral authority compounded the difficulty. The result was tragic for him, and for the nation.

President Johnson eagerly anticipated the 1964 election as a personal referendum, a plebiscite offering him a ticket of admission to the White House in his own right rather than as an “accidental president”; 1964 would release him from the Kennedy bondage. His wish seemed to be granted. Whatever his personal merits, Lyndon Johnson was lucky—blessed, it might seem—in having an opponent that year who politically and emotionally terrified a substantial part of the American electorate. The President’s triumph over Senator Barry Goldwater rivaled Franklin D. Roosevelt’s landslide victory in 1936. Johnson’s victory was total, absolute, and, like so much else about him, excessive. The staggering dimensions of his election, with 61 percent of the popular vote, certainly gave him an exaggerated sense of his mandate. Ironically, however, the very scale of his victory served to heighten suspicions of him.

Barry Goldwater, the junior Senator from Arizona, had captured the Republican nomination on the strength of a dedicated, resourceful organization, and because of his appeal as a genuine political alternative. He also promised to “get tough” with the “international Communist conspiracy.” In May 1964, Goldwater urged greater American involvement in the war in South Vietnam. Specifically, he called for the bombing of supply routes in the North. When told that the dense jungle cover hid many of the trails, he suggested the possibility of “defoliation of the forests by low-yield atomic weapons.” Two months later, Goldwater said that victory in Vietnam was assured if the military were given a free hand.

No matter the outcome in 1964, Goldwater had sparked a movement to make conservatism respectable, and it proved to be a movement that would not roll over and die as political pundits insisted it must or should. Yet Goldwater’s moment of triumph also sealed his fate. When he told his loyal followers at the San Francisco Republican Convention in July that “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice [a]nd … moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue,” many Americans regarded him as a moral monster commanding a pack of fanatics totally alien to the American mainstream.
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Actually, Goldwater’s words had a noble quality, but the context distorted the message into something sinister.

Goldwater’s hopes for upsetting the President in the 1964 election rested on his ability to persuade voters of Johnson’s moral defects. That image was ready-made and exploitable, but Goldwater could not overcome his own, larger negatives. Americans realized Johnson’s shortcomings, yet planned to vote for him. “Johnson leaves me cold, but I am going to ring doorbells for him,” said a St. Louis optometrist—hastily adding: “Goldwater is beyond belief.” Pollster Samuel Lubell described a Dayton, Ohio, precinct where
early one-fourth of those who intended to vote for the President questioned his fundamental honesty. The eloquent voice of the Very Reverend Francis B. Sayre, Jr., of the Episcopal cathedral in the nation’s capital, a son-in-law of Woodrow Wilson, seemed to speak for many Americans. He deplored the “sterile choice” confronting the electorate, a choice between “a man of dangerous ignorance and devastating uncertainty” and “a man whose public house is splendid in its every appearance, but whose private lack of ethic must inevitably introduce termites at the very foundation.”
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The 1964 election seemed simple enough, with its apparent ideological conflict. But in truth, the clash was more complex, pitting Republican ideological concerns against Democratic programmatic agendas. One side had ideology without program; the other, programs largely devoid of any coherent philosophical scheme. Neither proved wholly satisfactory in the 1960s—and the problem continued to especially plague the Democrats for the next two decades. Following the election, a Maryland housewife thought the country was domestically “mixed up.” She bemoaned the lack of direction. “I think it’s very, very confused. People have lost the old rules and values by which they lived, and they haven’t got any new ones to substitute.”
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The President was not “mixed up”; if anything, the election puffed his well-endowed ego. Press Secretary George Reedy noted the change. American elections, Reedy observed, had “elements of sanctification,” but Johnson had advanced the concept “to one of deification.” The President’s natural wariness—even fear—toward the press turned to contempt. “I’ve been kissing asses all my life and I don’t have to kiss them anymore,” he declared. As for holding press conferences, Johnson instructed Reedy to “tell those press bastards of yours that I’ll see them when I want to and not before.”
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The 1964 campaign was a referendum on the welfare state, now three decades old. It also focused on the issues of war and peace, particularly highlighting the ominous developments in Southeast Asia. Johnson had a veritable monopoly on the peace corner. Speaking in Eufaula, Oklahoma, on September 25, he could not resist gilding the lily: “There are those that say you ought to go North and drop bombs, to try to wipe out supply lines, and they think that would escalate the war. We don’t want our American boys to do the fighting for Asian boys. We don’t want to get involved … with 700 million people and get tied down in a land war in Asia.”
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In the meantime, Barry Goldwater was the candidate who reputedly wanted to “lob one into the men’s room in the Kremlin.”

Johnson promised “peace for all Americans,” yet he repeatedly emphasized that what his predecessors and Congress had defined as vital national and world interests demanded an American presence in South Vietnam, as well as in Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Thailand, and the Philippines. In other ways as well, his private actions did not match his public prudence. During the election campaign, Johnson approved numerous secret operations
throughout Southeast Asia, including air operations against the North. On October 1, National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy sent the President a memo acknowledging the probability that American forces would be engaged in “some air and land action in the Laotian corridor or even in North Vietnam within the next two months.”
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Johnson’s victory inevitably produced claims of a “mandate.” But as always in American politics, the question was, “Mandate for what?” For endorsing the President’s legislative record? Probably. For advancing the Great Society? Possibly. For sustaining the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution authorizing presidential retaliation for attacks on American personnel in Vietnam? Yes—at least, if such attacks were overt. For keeping American boys out of Asian wars? Certainly. Ironically, LBJ’s campaign rhetoric regarding the war established an image of apparent deception that would plague him in the years to come, as he led the nation deeper and deeper into the Vietnam quagmire.

The Gulf of Tonkin incident, early in August 1964, and Johnson’s subsequent dealings with Congress, eventually shaped that image of deception more than any other event of his presidency. The congressional resolution authorizing Johnson to retaliate against North Vietnamese attacks never escaped the smell of presidential duplicity. Whether Johnson used the occasion to fulfill longstanding plans for wider American involvement in the war, as Senator J. William Fulbright later believed, or whether the resolution resulted from the President’s fear that Goldwater and the Right would preempt him on the issue of standing up to Communism—or both—the Tonkin Gulf Resolution was a watershed not only for the Vietnam war but for the relationship between the executive and legislative branches for the next decade.
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What happened in the Tonkin Gulf on the nights of August 2 and 4 remains to this day somewhat cloudy. What is certain is that the Administration neither fully understood what had occurred nor reported the “incidents” fairly and fully. In January, Johnson had approved military plans for covert activities against North Vietnam—“dirty tricks,” as they were known. By early summer, these operations increased as South Vietnamese resistance deteriorated.

On the night of August 2, three Vietnamese PT boats attacked the American destroyer
Maddox.
The destroyer sank one. Intercepts of enemy radio traffic showed that the North believed the Americans had coordinated action with the South Vietnamese. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara later testified that the incident occurred thirty miles out to sea, when in fact the vessels had been only thirteen miles from shore. McNamara also denied any coordination, insisting that
Maddox
had been on a routine patrol mission. For the moment, Johnson and his advisers decided not to escalate the action but vowed to maintain naval operations in the Gulf despite warnings from the naval commander on the scene that they constituted “an unacceptable
risk.” The Pentagon ordered
Maddox
and another destroyer,
C. Turner Joy
, back into action on August 3. The next night, the commander radioed that North Vietnamese intercepts showed that the enemy believed the destroyers were preparing to attack their bases. Again, what happened is in dispute. The destroyers signaled that enemy boats were attacking; whether they had been sighted on radar or had actually attacked remains in question. No matter, the President left no doubt of his resolve to retaliate.

But Johnson needed congressional acquiescence—for political, hardly constitutional, reasons. The pressures of the pending election, combined with his innate political caution, dictated that he seek congressional cooperation. By the evening of August 4, Johnson had secured promises of support from the leadership for both retaliation and a resolution authorizing executive initiatives. And that night, carrier-based aircraft attacked North Vietnamese naval stations and an oil depot on the Gulf, even while Pentagon wireless operators were still seeking details of the attacks on the American destroyers.

Johnson prevailed on his Senate friends to secure the necessary resolution. Fulbright, Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, steered the measure through—to his eventual regret. The Senator persuaded himself that the resolution would fend off Goldwater’s hawkish appeals and that a limited American military response would set the stage for serious negotiations between the warring Vietnamese parties and the United States. Years later, Fulbright realized that Johnson had ordered the destroyers back into action to provoke an “ ‘excuse’ which would allow him to retaliate militarily and, later, to play upon the ‘chauvinism’ of the Congress.”
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