The Accidental President

Part Six

The first days of Lyndon Johnson’s presidency were a mass of confusion, grief, abrupt realignments in position and prospects, and an immediate cascade of urgent issues and decisions that had to be made.

The LBJ tapes of those days show a president managing what were immediate challenges, including the creation of what became the Warren Commission after Chief Justice Earl Warren was persuaded to investigate the assassination and deal with conspiracy theories that to this day have never been completely resolved. What to say in his first address to a joint session of Congress was, not surprisingly, extremely sensitive, and Johnson relied on Ted Sorensen, Kennedy’s speechwriter, to get it right. And congressional action on the budget and taxes were a fixation for Johnson, who was doubtless relieved to be back in areas where he had experience rather than having to deal with the unprecedented aftermath of martyrdom of a young president.

A great deal has been written about Johnson’s relationship with the Kennedy family, especially Jackie and Bobby as they were always called, including by Johnson. Every conversation with the new widow in those days, and thereafter, was loving to the point of unctuousness, and she would respond with what sounded like purring. Altogether different was LBJ’s loathing of the attorney general and Bobby’s similar contempt for Johnson.

Johnson considered Bobby a political rival of major potential. For his part, Bobby, who so disliked LBJ he had tried to keep him off the 1960 ticket, considered the new president a usurper. The antagonism was beyond mediation.

William Manchester’s book The Death of a President captures every iota of real and perceived slights in the early weeks of the transition. Johnson’s combination of awe, envy, and suspicion of the Kennedys was a profoundly personal matter embedded in his character.

In time, the evolution of Bobby as heir to his brother’s political mantle and Jackie, who became, privately, a passionate opponent of the Vietnam war, would be strands in the unraveling of Johnson’s own judgment about the conflict. Because of Robert McNamara’s closeness to the family, this was an aspect of his dealings with LBJ that was especially hard to parse.

McNamara was an unusually loyal person and in that, he was sincere – in this case to three people whose relationships defied explicable boundaries.

For example, in August 1964, at the start of what became known as the Tonkin Gulf incidents – a major turning point in the direct battle with North Vietnam – a critical meeting took place in the White House on the morning of August 2. McNamara told his editors that the record of the sessions reveals that he was not in attendance, only arriving later in the day.

“Where the hell was I? I was at Newport with Jackie. She was at her mother’s house, had stayed overnight. Marg was traveling and I went up and stayed overnight Saturday night with Jackie.”

The point of the anecdote was that McNamara did not consider himself responsible, at least initially, for decisions about the Tonkin Gulf episode. In 1993, with Jackie alive at the time, he said, “I was and am close to Jackie. I’m very fond of her.” This explanation for his absence from the meeting was omitted in his memoir.

Vietnam was very much on the crowded agenda in late 1963 and 1964, and Johnson held multiple meetings with the national security leadership, reflecting the reality that the situation in the country after the ouster of Diem and Nhu had only gotten worse.

Johnson decided to send McNamara to Vietnam again to assess the situation. Upon his return to Washington on December 21, 1963, McNamara publicly said, as quoted in In Retrospect with words he added to the statement: “‘We observed the results of a very substantial increase in Vietcong activity’ (true); but I then added, ‘We reviewed the plans of the South Vietnamese and we have every reason to believe they will be successful’ (an overstatement at best).”

He continues, “I was far more forthright -- and gloomy -- in my report to the president. ‘The situation is very disturbing,’ I told him, predicting that ‘current trends, unless reversed in the next 2-3 months, will lead to neutralization at best or more likely to a Communist-controlled state.’”

In the memoir, McNamara raises, without answering, the question that was central to the reputation he developed for dissembling in his public appraisals of the war: “It is a profound, enduring, and universal ethical and moral dilemma: how, in times of war and crisis, can senior government officials be completely frank to their own people without giving aid and comfort to the enemy?”

And there is the essence of what would bedevil the Johnson administration going forward; consistently misleading the American public was a blunder with consequences then and to this day, well into the twenty-first century.

 Vietnam and every other foreign policy issue at the height of the Cold War were subordinate, however, to Johnson’s singular priority: winning the presidential election in November 1964. If elected in his own right, he could stop deriding himself as the “accidental president.”

McNamara sparred with his editors over whether Johnson put off decisions on Vietnam solely for political reasons. The underlying problem, he insisted, was that there was no consensus among the military or among the president’s advisers on what should be done. The solution was to adopt wording like “Hard as it may be to believe…LBJ was not just making a political choice.”

Nothing in LBJ’s character, especially after the humiliation of the years as vice president, could possibly be more important to him than restoring his self-confidence as a politician and as a man with power and the capacity to use it.

The events of 1964 would be many, but the record shows that nothing would be allowed to diminish Johnson’s public stance in opposition to widening the Vietnam war, especially after the Republican Party nominated Barry Goldwater, who was fierce in his assertions that the administration was effectively conceding the war to the communists.

A fragment in Robert Caro’s The Passage of Power captures Johnson’s determination to keep Vietnam simmering. In March 1964, McGeorge Bundy, with some exasperation, asked Johnson, “What is your own internal thinking on this, Mr. President?”

Johnson replied: “I just can’t believe that we can’t take 15,000 [sic] advisers and 200,000 people [South Vietnamese troops] and maintain the status quo for six months. I just believe we can do that, if we do it right.”

Bundy’s biographer Gordon Goldstein writes in Lessons in Disaster that there was a “litany of nondecisions” in 1964 – “the decision not to withdraw, not to escalate, not to neutralize, not to debate the domino theory, and, fatefully, not to examine the military limitations and implications of a massive deployment of U.S ground combat forces to South Vietnam.” In Bundy’s mind, Goldstein concludes, politics became “the enemy of strategy” and the justification for official indecision and public deception.

McNamara’s position was unique among the senior advisers as the Johnson administration settled in. As a recognized family intimate of the Kennedys, he had to straddle his emotions about that and Johnson’s feelings about Jackie and Bobby while adapting his continuing role as secretary of defense to a vastly different person in the Oval Office.

McNamara writes in In Retrospect:

“Between his ascendency to the presidency and my departure from the Pentagon, President Johnson and I developed the strongest possible bonds of mutual respect and affection. However, our relationship was different from the one I had with President Kennedy, and more complicated. Johnson was a rough individual, rough on his friends as well as his enemies. He took every person’s measure. He sought to find a person’s weakness, and once he found it, he tried to play on it. He could be a bully, though he was never that way with me. He learned that I would deal straight with him, telling him what I believed rather than I thought he wanted to hear, but also that once he, as the president, made a decision, I would do all in my power to carry it out.”

In our transcripts, however, McNamara portrayed aspects of the relationship in another way. With the buildup in Vietnam underway in 1965, McNamara recommended a tax increase to pay the cost. “I said to Johnson, in effect, ‘That’s going to be inflationary, we have to have a tax increase.’ And Johnson said, ‘Where’s your vote count?’ I said, ‘…get your own damn vote count.’ He said, ‘You get your ass up there and get your vote count.’

“So, I make an effort and I get the vote count and I come back...Sure, I knew when I recommended it would be difficult. But I said I would rather try and fail than not at all. It’s the right thing to do.”

LBJ responded: “That’s what’s wrong with you, Bob, you don’t know a goddamned thing about politics.”

Bullseye. McNamara’s technocratic acuity and demonstrated willingness to carry out presidential edicts, was not matched by political judgment and measured public style. The result was his reputation for bombastic recitation of the facts, which he privately understood was a presentation flaw but could not modify.

Nuance in managing public perception was a Kennedy skill, and political savvy was Johnson’s. McNamara had neither.

Next Week: Part Seven: The State Department

To read previous installments in this series go to www.platformbooksllc.net. There is an archive of earlier pieces and a link to sources, acknowledgements and the audio of McNamara working with his editors on his memoir.