Whose War Was It?
Knoll, Erwin
BOOKS Whose War Was It: LYNDON JOHNSON'S WAR: The Road to Stalemate in Vietnam by Larry Berman W.W. Norton. 254 pp. $18.95. by Erwin Knoll In 1964, when he ran for election to a full four-year...
...intervention in Southeast Asia, Johnson extorted phony "success statistics" from the military and civilian officials on the ground...
...Long after some of his more rational aides—notably McNamara and his successor as Defense Secretary, Clark Clifford-had lost all faith in the possibility of salvaging anything from the bloody adventure in Indochina, Johnson clung stubbornly to the fantasy that there was light at the end of the tunnel...
...I did, and we are...
...He wasn't going to send American boys to do what Asian boys ought to be doing...
...In his own turgid Presidential memoir, The Vantage Point, published in 1971, Johnson wrote about what he felt his Administration had "accomplished" in Vietnam: "We had kept our word in Southeast Asia...
...But the central argument of Berman's book—that it was Lyndon Johnson's war-is, it seems to me, dead wrong...
...It was a curious circular process: In an attempt to shore up faltering support for the U.S...
...We had opposed and defeated aggression, as we promised we would...
...by Erwin Knoll In 1964, when he ran for election to a full four-year term in the office he had inherited from his assassinated predecessor, Lyndon Johnson was the "peace candidate...
...We had also demonstrated, with our resources and with our blood, that we cared about Asia...
...I was certain that every man, woman, and child in that vast and important part of the world was, at that moment, more secure and more hopeful because of what we had done—because America had cared enough to stand and to fight, and to keep its promises...
...It was their war...
...Johnson to his staff when Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara was called to answer questions on Capitol Hill: "There is something wrong with our system when our leaders are testifying instead of thinking about the war...
...Though some Camelot loyalists cling to the delusion that John Kennedy was about to disengage from Indochina when he was cut down in Dallas, there is no evidence to support that claim, and there is every reason to believe that the war would have run its disastrous course...
...even the most cynical manipulators of public opinion have a way of succumbing, in the end, to their own propaganda...
...Government, and of the politics and personalities that play a part...
...And we had seen them move well down the road...
...Lyndon Johnson's War is a readable, carefully documented account of a crucially important phase of recent American history...
...It was his wicked Republican opponent, Barry Goldwater, a self-described superhawk, who would do those terrible things...
...offers fascinating glimpses of the decisionmaking process in the highest reaches of the U.S...
...And his successors haven't figured it out yet...
...This is not Johnson's war," he shouted at Washington Post reporter Chalmers Roberts in October 1967...
...It Erwin Knoll, the editor of The Progressive, covered the White House in the Johnson Administration...
...He turned out to be wrong on every count, but he wasn't the only one...
...Though the American "commitment" in Vietnam dated back to the Eisenhower Administration, though the process of stealthy escalation had begun with the "military advisers" John Kennedy dispatched to Southeast Asia, though the American Establishment was, virtually without audible exception, fully in support of the war at the outset, it swiftly became "Lyndon Johnson's war," and ultimately Lyndon Johnson's tragedy...
...mission to control the destiny of lesser breeds around the world, faith in the boundless confidence of the American people in the "experts" who called the shots on issues too complicated for ordinary folk to deal with...
...In the end, his reputation and his Presidency shattered, he had no choice but to give up his aspirations for a second elected term...
...He fiercely fought the notion that Vietnam was his doing...
...Like the overwhelming majority of the electorate, they went all the way with LBJ...
...then he started believing it himself...
...then he rejected more realistic assessments because they didn't square with previous "intelligence...
...The poor booby never did figure out what it was all about...
...He wouldn't bomb North Vietnam back into the Stone Age...
...He was an instrument of imperial faith—faith in American technology and military might to prevail over all opponents, faith in this country's right to commit any atrocity in the name of fighting communism, faith in the U.S...
...We had given seventeen million South Vietnamese a chance to build their own country and their own institutions...
...Larry Berman, a professor of political science at the University of California, Davis, has pored over the archives at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library in Austin, Texas, as well as recently declassified notes, memos, cables, and other documents pertaining to the Vietnam war...
...then he dished out the good news to the gullible media and the supine Congress...
...He was abetted in that pernicious foolishness by such diehard hawks as Secretary of State Dean Rusk and National Security Adviser Walt W. Rostow...
...It was Lyndon Johnson's misfortune to preside over the American empire at a time when its hubris climaxed and crashed...
...victory in Vietnam...
...If I drop dead tomorrow, this war will still be with you...
...The gag making the rounds in Republican circles went something like this: "They told me that if I voted for Gold-water, we'd soon be fighting a full-scale war in Indochina...
...And as it turned out, the catastrophic intervention in Vietnam went on as Richard Nixon's war after Johnson was driven from office...
...But none of that establishes the Vietnam war as Johnson's...
...His arrogant faith was shared by the preponderance of America's decision makers—in Government and industry, in both major political parties, in the press...
...By the same token, there's little reason to assume that another President-even Goldwater—could have made matters much worse...
...So liberals swallowed their reservations—they always do—and embraced the wheeler-dealer Texas pol...
...Barely a year later, demonstrators at the White House fence were chanting, "Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today...
...To be sure, Berman adduces ample evidence that Johnson engaged in massive self-delusion about the prospects for U.S...
...I believe Johnson's angry outburst at Chal Roberts of The Washington Post was, in fact, one of his more truthful comments on the Vietnam war...
Vol. 53 • June 1989 • No. 6
