Bill Whittle Explains How Vietnam War Destroyed Lyndon Johnson's Presidency and Great Society Legacy
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Bill Whittle Explains How Vietnam War Destroyed Lyndon Johnson's Presidency and Great Society Legacy
Bill Whittle examines the tragic paradox of Lyndon Baines Johnson's presidency: a master politician who rose from the dusty poverty of rural Texas to become perhaps the most effective Senate Majority Leader in American history, only to see his ambitious Great Society programs overshadowed by an unwinnable war. Johnson's incremental, halfhearted approach to Vietnam, personally selecting bombing targets from the White House in his pajamas while imposing crippling restrictions on American forces, turned a morally justifiable defense against communist aggression into an incompetent disaster. As body bags mounted and protests raged, LBJ found himself trapped in a conflict he couldn't win and couldn't escape, ultimately forcing him to abandon his bid for reelection in 1968.
It was 2:38 p.m. Central Standard Time on November 22nd, 1963. President John F. Kennedy was dead, assassinated less than two hours earlier. In the cramped quarters of a blue and white Boeing 707 with the call sign Air Force One, Vice President Lyndon Baines Johnson took the oath of office. He was now the 36th President of the United States.
He was born just 207 miles to the southwest in a dusty patch of road called Stonewall, Texas on August 27th, 1908. Lyndon Johnson's childhood was spent in what biographer Robert Caro described as a land without electricity, where the soil was so rocky that it was hard to earn a living from it. Unlike the perfectly groomed, somewhat aloof Kennedy, Johnson was a classic back-slapping, handshaking politician. Everything Johnson did had Texas dust on it.
The 87-Vote Victory and Rise to Power
In his run for the U.S. Senate in 1948, following 11 years in the House of Representatives, Johnson drew huge crowds by showing up at campaign events in a never-before-seen-by-God actual helicopter, which he named the Johnson City Windmill. Out of 1 million votes cast, Johnson won the Democratic Senate primary by a mere 87 votes. Beating his Republican opponent in the general election proved to be much easier. Only 40 years old, the Texan of humble origins was now a member of the most exclusive club in America.
By the late 1950s, Lyndon Baines Johnson, universally referred to as LBJ, had become arguably the most effective Senate Majority Leader in the country's history. This was due in large part to the bullying, flattering, and intimidating one-on-one sessions that became known as "the treatment." He would back his target into a corner, poke him in the chest, threaten, cajole, even weep. He'd wax exuberant one moment, be scornful the next, complain, promise, compliment, and curse. And he almost always got what he wanted.
Two Presidential Obsessions: Great Society and Vietnam
During his six years as president, he was preoccupied with two things: his Great Society project—hundreds of social programs he was convinced would end poverty—and the Vietnam War. LBJ didn't end poverty and he didn't end the Vietnam War, but the Vietnam War ended LBJ.
The origins of the war can be traced to the Communist takeover of China in 1949 and the Chinese-backed North Korean invasion of South Korea the following year. If South Vietnam were to fall to the Communist North, it was logical to assume that Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, and the rest of Southeast Asia would topple in turn—a potential catastrophe known as the Domino Theory. Johnson firmly believed in the Domino Theory, as most foreign policy experts did, but he couldn't bring himself to make a firm commitment to win the war. His heart was in his Great Society programs. He didn't want to get bogged down in a conflict on the other side of the world, but ironically, he ensured that's exactly what would happen by pursuing an incremental, half-in, half-out strategy.
Fighting a War in Pajamas: Johnson's Fatal Strategy
Johnson personally selected the next day's airstrike targets from the isolation of the White House Situation Room, often in his pajamas. "Those boys can't hit an outhouse without my permission," he once said. He wasn't exaggerating—it was literally true. This might have been the worst possible way to fight against a light, fast, and imaginative enemy.
Here's just three examples of the kind of restrictions that Lyndon Johnson imposed upon American forces fighting in Vietnam:
Retreating enemy soldiers could only be fired upon with the intent to wound by aiming at the lower extremities
Air crews could not shoot at surface-to-air missile sites unless the SAMs shot first
Both Hanoi, the enemy capital, and Haiphong, their major port, were off-limits completely
A Morally Justifiable War Fought Incompetently
This war needed to be fought. America was defending South Vietnam against a brutal communist invasion from North Vietnam, just as it had defended South Korea against a brutal communist invasion from North Korea. The tragedy was that such a morally justifiable war was fought so incompetently, ineptly, and absurdly.
The problem was Johnson. He didn't see the conflict as a war—he saw it as a negotiation. Unfortunately for Johnson, the United States, and the South Vietnamese people, the North Vietnamese were immune to "the treatment." Every ceasefire, every bombing halt was perceived as weakness, another opportunity to resupply and rearm. Johnson's political inclination was to give the North Vietnamese what they wanted and thereby negotiate a deal, but the North Vietnamese didn't want a deal—they wanted Vietnam, all of it.
The Trap and the Tragic End
Johnson was trapped. He couldn't win the war and he couldn't get out of it. As more and more American soldiers came home in body bags—the total would come to over 58,000—as anti-war campus protests raged across the country, and as the press turned against him, Johnson's popularity plummeted.
By the next election in 1968, both LBJ and the American people had had enough. On March 31st of 1968, Johnson shocked the nation and his own closest advisers when he announced on television: "I shall not seek and I will not accept the nomination of my party for another term as your president."
He had outdone his hero Franklin Roosevelt with his Great Society programs, but he was undone by a foreign war in a faraway country.
