in keeping with the desire of the president and his advisers to exquisitely calibrate the level of violence, Johnson personally oversaw the selection of targets. A master negotiator, he viewed bombs not as instruments of destruction but rather, in the words of his biographer Doris Kearns Goodwin, as a way of “bargaining without words.”20 Hanoi, however, did not understand what Johnson was up to. To the Politburo, bombs combined with offers to negotiate simply looked like duplicity.
