The Best and the Brightest: Kennedy-Johnson Administrations (Modern Library)

by David Halberstam

Johnson was hailed as a man of wisdom, balance and restraint; the contrast with Goldwater, who seemed anxious to turn all problems over to the Joint Chiefs, was marked.

(even Walter Lippmann seemed pleased, because Lippmann, a believer in an American policy of blue water and clear skies for the Pacific, that is, staying out of land wars, thought Johnson was signaling the limits of the United States in a Pacific war rather than just the beginning).

In July, Harris noted, 58 percent of the nation had criticized Johnson’s handling of the war, while after Tonkin public opinion virtually reversed itself, and 72 percent approved.

There were only three national concerns, anyway, he told reporters traveling with him on the plane. “Everybody worries about war and peace. The men worry about heart attacks and the women worry about cancer of the tit.”

“We’ll have nine, eh, maybe even eighteen months before the Hill turns around on us,” he would say. “We have that much time to get it all through.”

If he seemed weak as a President in dealing with Vietnam, he was sure it would undermine him politically. Hell, Truman and Acheson had lost China, and maybe it wasn’t their fault, but they were blamed for it, and when it happened the Republicans in Congress were waiting and jumped on it, and Truman lost the Congress and then the country—it hadn’t happened over domestic issues, remember that, he said,

There was a growing citizen restlessness which was not reflected in the political order; the politicians and a good many in the population had very different definitions of who the enemies were and what the problems were.

The government itself was still geared up to hold the lines in the Cold War, but a particularly influential part of the citizenry believed that it was a thing of the past, that the arms race was futile and destructive, that the enemy was really bigness, technology and the government itself.

Liberals had always grown up thinking big and powerful government was good; now for a variety of reasons they were moving back from that position.

“I am troubled by the feeling which runs all through the film, of discredit and even contempt for our whole defense establishment, up to and even including the hypothetical commander in chief.

The problem was not a Negro problem, they said, it was a white problem. They did not want In, they wanted Out. They did not want programs; indeed, in the changing mood of the black communities, leaders who were seen co-operating with the white structure soon lost part of their credibility.

Even later, as Johnson made his decision to have both the Great Society and the war, the war for the conservatives, the Great Society for the liberals, he would be giving the latter something that much of the American liberal intellectual community was no longer interested in; indeed, as Gene McCarthy noted in 1968 after he made his challenge against Johnson, “he keeps going to them with the list of bills he’s passed—the laundry list, and he doesn’t know that they aren’t interested any more.”

Johnson decided that one reason for it was the brilliance and drive of one of McNamara’s deputies, Joseph Califano, and he set out to bring him to the White House.

Early in 1969, after the election, after it was all over, his attention to detail still lived. An aide wanted to go to New York to look for a job, but Johnson was unhappy about the trip. He did not want any job hunting until after the inauguration; it was, after all, one more reminder that he was leaving office. So having given his reluctant approval, he remembered later that day to call the White House booking office to make sure that the aide had paid for his own ticket.

without changing stride he switched from irrigation to the subject of his aide George Reedy’s shirts. “You know, that boy Reedy never packs enough white shirts.”

as President he always knew who had dined with Robert Kennedy.

To a young Air Force corporal trying to show him the presidential helicopter—“This is your helicopter, sir”—he answered, of course, “They’re all my helicopters, son.”

of Bundy he felt there was no real loyalty to the Kennedys (a judgment in which Robert Kennedy had concurred), nor to Johnson, but only toward self and sense of class.

The Kennedys demanded loyalty out of confidence, Johnson demanded it out of insecurity.

He became almost bitter about the injustice of it all; Kennedy would get off because he was a Kennedy, there was a double standard, “But if I had been with a girl and she had been stung by a bumblebee, then they would put me in Sing Sing,” he said.

demanding that they accompany him into the bathroom for conversations during the most personal of body demands, virtually driving Douglas Dillon out of the Cabinet by this maneuver alone.

looked up at Johnson and said in his carefully controlled voice, “You can hear what I’m saying and so can everyone else in this room,” and calmly continued to speak.

when Johnson was at the height of his accomplishments, he had complained to Dean Acheson about the fact that for all the good things he was doing, he was not beloved in the hearts of his countrymen, and why was that? Acheson looked at him and said simply, “You are not a very likable man.”

This time he would find himself dealing with a man who was a true revolutionary, incorruptible, a man who had no price, or at least no price that Lyndon Johnson with his Western bombs and Western dollars could meet. But it would take him quite a while to find out that he had met his match.

All Reedy could think of was Barbara Ward’s The Rich Nations and the Poor Nations, a book on how the rich should help the poor which Johnson had liked because it was similar to his own ideas. From there Sidey went to see Moyers. Yes, said Moyers, he was an avid reader. What books? Well, there was Barbara Ward’s book The Rich Nations and the Poor Nations. And from there to Valenti, who said Johnson read more books than almost anyone he knew. What books? Valenti hesitated and thought for a moment, then his face lit up. Barbara Ward’s The Rich Nations and the Poor Nations

He believed in 1960 that since Senator Tom Dodd of Connecticut was for him, this meant that he was doing well in New England, and he did not realize what had happened to him until he reached Los Angeles. The problem there was of course not just that he read the country through the Senate, but he had so terrified his own people that they did not dare tell him bad news.

(In the same way he claimed that an uncle of his stood at the Alamo, which under most conditions would be all right, except that the whole point of the Alamo was how few men stood there, which made it tough on them against the Mexicans but somewhat easy for later historians to check whether a Johnson forebear had been there, and to find that one had not.)

She told of Lyndon in elementary school reading, as befitted a class leader, a poem of his own choosing, entitled, curiously enough, “I’d Rather Be Mamma’s Boy.” She also reprinted an essay Lyndon published when he was twenty-two in the college newspaper, entitled “To Our Mothers.” “. . . There is no love on earth comparable to that of a mother. Our best description of it is that of all types of earthly love, it most nearly approaches the divine

(Years later McGeorge Bundy would tell friends that there was one thing you could not do with Lyndon Johnson and that was to go public with it, and by going public, Johnson meant talking to anyone else.)

Similarly, one of the reasons why the Democratic party did so little on major tax reform in the decade of the fifties was the relationship Johnson had with the big money in Texas and their proxies in the Senate (he could say of Senator Paul Douglas of Illinois, a constant critic of the oil-depletion allowance, that Douglas would understand it just a bit better if there were a few oil wells in Cook County).

At first it had been small things which amused them: his insistence that he drank bourbon, when in fact he drank Scotch;

he could tell a somewhat surprised historian named Henry Graff, invited to the White House to report on Vietnam decision making, that he had earned the Silver Star for helping to shoot down twenty Zeros.

out of that first year came friendships specifically forged at Roosevelt’s direction, which would last Johnson’s entire career, ties to men like Abe Fortas, Ed Weisl, William O. Douglas.

classic example of the former of the two problems would be Bob McNamara telling Arthur Goldberg midway through the escalation, when Goldberg raised a negative point to him, that it was certainly a good point but would he please not raise it with the President, it would only upset him).

Kennedy did not view dissent as a personal challenge.

Richard Helms of the CIA once called Newsweek executives to suggest that perhaps Kennedy’s relationship with Ben Bradlee, their Washington bureau chief, was constituting a major security leak.

Thus the decisions on Vietnam would be made by very few men, and the players would be different from those under Kennedy. To Johnson, McNamara was not just a forceful statistician and bureaucrat, his judgment and wisdom were invoked; Rusk, who had been something of a liaison man with the Hill before, became a genuine Secretary of State, a wise, thoughtful man, a man not too quick on his horse.

the truth of the war never entered the upper-level American calculations; that this was a revolutionary war, and that the other side held title to the revolution because of the colonial war which had just ended.

McNamara’s statistics and calculations were of no value at all, because they never contained the fact that if the ratio was ten to one in favor of the government, it still meant nothing, because the one man was willing to fight and die and the ten were not.

There were, he said, four alternatives. The first was to throw in our hand and withdraw. The second was accommodation through negotiation, which he said was a sign of political weakness. The third was to take military action against the North, which could be done by the South Vietnamese air force, with or without U.S. participation, either in retaliation for specific acts of violence or as part of a general deterrent.

The fourth and final option was to improve and expand the in-country pacification program

He changed his views on the bombing in the latter half of 1964, and after that to a limited degree on sending combat troops. It was a crucial change in the cast of characters.

They saw the Army withering away beneath them; they believed, as Taylor did, that massive retaliation did not fit a complex world, that the world would be unstable and that the future for the Army was its capacity to fight brush-fire wars in places like Algeria and Indochina.

When the Times was finally confident of the depth of the commitment, Carroll asked for some of the staff papers, which the colonels turned over and which became the basis for articles by Anthony Leviero in May 1956 (“Inter-Service Rivalry Flashed”).

The colonels were ordered not to come to their offices. Yeuell’s files were cleaned out and burned.

Yeuell, who was investigated three times in one year, went to the War College a year ahead of schedule, but eventually lost faith in the Army and drifted out of it. Metheny, one of the other leaders, was immediately transferred to a meaningless post in Florida; the others were quickly and quietly switched in their assignments.

But still no orations are devoted at home to the ascendancy of the American Soldier. Why is this so?

So they saw the President only twice in the months right before the President made the decision to escalate. Many of them would come to despise McNamara;

Marines would be the first troops to go), and they were all very hawkish. The Air Force believed in air power and bombing, old-fashioned, unrelieved bombing; the Navy, anxious to show that the carrier still worked and to get its share of roles and missions in what had been largely an Army show up to now, was hawkish; and Greene was hawkish.

He was not in awe of McGeorge Bundy, thinking Bundy too much the pragmatist (Bundy in turn would call Ball “the theologian” because of too much belief, and occasionally irritated by Ball’s independence and individualism, once said to him, “The trouble with you, George, is that you always want to be the piano player”). Part of the tension between them, of course, was that each saw the other as a possible successor to Rusk.