Speech That Halted a Great Society

The President took a folded sheet of paper from his coat pocket, and to a small group of family members and house guests assembled for luncheon on the second floor of the White House, he read the stunning final paragraph of a speech he was scheduled to deliver on national television that evening.

It was March 31, 1968--20 years ago today. The passage that Lyndon Baines Johnson read aloud contained the jolting information that, contrary to all expectation, he would not seek re-election as President of the United States.

The most forceful reaction came from the two house guests, Arthur and Mathilde Krim. They had learned the night before, to their considerable dismay, that the President was planning to make such an announcement. His purpose, he had told them--as he would later tell a much wider audience--was to remove the divisive and frustrating war in Vietnam from that election year’s political debates.

The Krims--he a motion picture executive, she a distinguished scientist--were old friends. More pertinent to the moment, they were devoted supporters of Johnson. Now they passionately pressed the arguments they had begun in the late-evening hours: L.B.J. needed another term to complete the agenda of social reform that characterized his Great Society; since he planned in his speech to de-escalate the fighting in Vietnam, why not wait and see what kind of effect that might have before taking such drastic action?

Another luncheon guest was Horace Busby, an aide who had been with Johnson off and on since his days as a congressman. Busby had been working with the President during the morning, in the Lincoln cabinet room, crafting the language of that fateful paragraph. The President left it to Busby to present the counter-arguments that had infused their work: The war had wrought too much internal chaos, and Johnson, who had come to personify the war in many minds, could not hope to govern effectively for four more years. By removing himself from the political arena, he could help bring the unity the nation so sorely needed, and even accomplish some worthwhile things he could not reach while he stood in the center of controversy. Moreover, only with this action would he be able to convince the enemy in Vietnam--and even some of his critics at home--of the sincerity of the peace initiative he would be making in his speech. The new President, whoever he would be, would have a productive honeymoon period with the Congress and the media.

Lady Bird Johnson, the First Lady, said little during this exchange. Later, it would emerge that she had known for some time that the President was considering such a move. The chief advice she had given had been that if he did decide not to run, he should announce that decision early enough to give other aspirants time to organize their campaigns. She had advocated following the example of President Harry Truman, who had selected March as the month to reveal his intention not to seek re-election in 1952; now it was the last day of March.

Johnson appeared to have made up his mind when he retired for an afternoon nap. But Busby, who continued to explain the President’s position to the unconvinced Krims, gave them a glimmer of hope: he himself was not totally convinced that the President would read that final passage; he had often seen L.B.J. keep his options open until the last minute and then do the unexpected.

Arthur Krim tried to fan this hope into life when he went into the President’s bedroom shortly before the speech was scheduled to begin. The President was putting on his coat and tie. “Mr. President,” Krim said, “you still have time to change your mind.”

“He was not angry,” Krim remembered later, “as well he might have been, having been through this so often over the weekend. He said simply, ‘Arthur, it’s done. There can be no change now. I have just ordered it put on the TelePrompTer.’ ”

After two decades, the boldness and electrifying surprise of that presidential speech have diminished. But in the experience of those who heard it, the memory endures. And in the experience of the nation as a whole, it stands as an episode of historic significance in a tumultuous time.

In a broad sense, the speech had its roots almost five years earlier in Lyndon Johnson’s oath of office after the death of John F. Kennedy. For when Vice President Johnson inherited the presidency, he inherited also the war, which would become his nemesis.

Viewed more narrowly, the story began on Jan. 30-31, 1968, the anniversary of the Lunar New Year in Vietnam--a holiday known to the Vietnamese people as Tet. In that holiday season, the communist forces we were fighting--the North Vietnamese Army and the South Vietnamese Viet Cong insurgents--launched a surprise and coordinated attack against virtually every major city and military installation in South Vietnam.

As Secretary of Defense Clark Clifford would later report to the President, the enemy’s ability to mount such a devastating, widespread offensive was a clear warning that the unpopular war would not soon end, despite the optimistic predictions the Administration had been making.

Nonetheless, the offensive itself failed to accomplish its objectives. Despite their massive commitment of forces and heavy losses, the communists were not able either to hold the cities or to rally the people inside them to their cause. They did not crack or cripple South Vietnam’s Army. Their assaults were quickly beaten back--most of them in just a few days--by U.S. and South Vietnamese troops.

But even though Tet was a military setback for the communists--and historians writing about it now generally present it as such--at the time, most Americans believed that the enemy had won a stunning victory, and that we had suffered a grievous loss.

Moreover, Tet was a turning point not just in the war itself but in the way the war would henceforth be regarded. Peter Braestrup, a journalist in Saigon at the time, later made an exhaustive study of the media’s reaction to Tet. The major result, he concluded, was that--not out of malice or conspiracy, but out of frustration and a “herd instinct”--news stories in the papers and on television began carrying a subtle but unmistakable message, which said in effect that Tet proved the critics of the war to have been right all along.

When Eugene McCarthy chalked up more of the vote in the New Hampshire Democratic presidential primary than had been expected--42%--it was looked upon as a victory. And because McCarthy was a dove, it was considered a dove’s victory. In the Wisconsin Democratic primary, to be held a few days later, some polls were forecasting an outright McCarthy victory.

It was in this environment, gloomy, troubled, potentially explosive, that the White House announced that the President would address the nation on the consuming question of Vietnam.

For days, preparation of the speech dominated the business of government. All the options available to the Administration in Vietnam were reviewed: a continuation of present policy; a stepping-up of activity and commitment, including even the commitment of the reserves; a new peace initiative, de-escalating the action, in an effort to persuade the communists to negotiate.

The decision that was finally made was to announce, unilaterally, with no advance signal demanded of a quid pro quo from the other side, a halt in the bombing over most of North Vietnam. The purpose, Johnson later said, was to demonstrate U.S. willingness to find a political solution to the war and test the willingness of the other side.

At 9 p.m., sitting at his desk in the oval office, the President looked into the eye of the camera and began his review of the status of the war in Vietnam. He announced that he was taking the first steps to de-escalate the war by ordering aircraft and naval vessels to halt their attacks over most of North Vietnam. He voiced his hope that the enemy would match that restraint.

Finally came the words that changed the presidency, ended a distinguished career and had its effect on the future course of the country: “With America’s sons in the field far away, with America’s future under challenge right here at home, with our hopes and the world’s hopes for peace in the balance every day, I do not believe that I should devote an hour or aday of my time to any personal partisan causes or to any duties other than the awesome duties of this office--the presidency of your country. Accordingly, I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your President.”

The White House switchboard lit up like a fireworks display. Across the country, people called Western Union or put pen to paper: all kinds of people, the celebrated and the unknown, hawks and doves, supporters and detractors. In all, over the next several days, 23,000 pieces of correspondence were unloaded at the White House. Very little of it was critical. It was one of Johnson’s finest hours. Throughout the nation he was hailed as a selfless patriot. And for a while, it looked as if he had done what he wanted most of all to do: to heal the wounds of a divided country.

He did not manage that, but it was a worthy try. His effort showed the nation how much he cared--and with a demonstration of statecraft at its most dramatic, he contributed vividly to the richness of American political lore.

In the years following Johnson’s departure from Washington, I was one of several former White House assistants who worked with him in the preparation of his memoirs. When it came to writing about the March 31 decision, I learned that all through his Administration he had been moving toward a decision not to run again in 1968. Even in 1964, before the Democratic convention which was his great personal triumph, he had considered such a withdrawal.

A victim of a massive heart attack when he was still in his 40s, he was concerned about his uncertain health, and the history of early death that had claimed many of the men in his family. Before the war’s destruction had eroded his popularity, he had begun discussing with Mrs. Johnson and close friends his desire to return to the ranch. The conversations had become more definite through 1967.

Did that dilute the sincerity of the initiative laid out in his March 31 speech? If so, Johnson never recognized the fact. To him, as it was finally expressed in his book, the speech simply provided “the right forum” for him to announce his decision, dramatizing as it did the sincerity of his “new effort . . . to seek the way to peace.”

If the decision left him with any regret, I never caught a glimpse of it. There are those who have said and written that he was bitter and frustrated in retirement. That does not describe the man I knew in those years. He was active--albeit decreasingly so, after a couple more heart attacks and on a smaller stage. Active and fulfilled and funny, right to the end. That’s the way it was, although not many people knew it.

Once, when we were driving around his ranch, with him at the wheel of his Lincoln, he talked about that misperception. “They said I was power hungry,” he said. There was a silence while we careened across the pastures. Then he said: “They had it all wrong.”