LBJ Viewed Vietnam in ’64 as ‘Damn Mess,’ Tapes Show

Almost a year before he began the large-scale military buildup in Vietnam, President Lyndon B. Johnson called the war “the biggest damn mess I ever saw” and lamented: “I don’t think it’s worth fighting for, and I don’t think we can get out.”

Johnson made the complaint in a May 27, 1964, phone conversation with his national security advisor, McGeorge Bundy. Tapes of the conversation, and another the same day with his close friend and political mentor, Sen. Richard Russell of Georgia, were released Friday by the LBJ Presidential Library.

They show that six months after he became president, Johnson agonized over what to do about Vietnam and was tormented by the prospect of sacrificing U.S. soldiers to a war he considered pointless.

“It’s just the biggest damn mess I ever saw,” he said.

Although he believed that public opinion was already against the war, Johnson also worried that Congress might run him out of office if he tried to withdraw.

“They’d impeach a president, though, that would run out, wouldn’t they?” he asked.

He also spoke movingly of not wanting to endanger U.S. soldiers in Vietnam.

“I’ve got a little old sergeant that works for me over there at the house, and he’s got six children, and I just put him up as the United States Army and Air Force and Navy every time I think about making this decision,” he told Russell.

“Thinking about sending that father of those six kids in there . . . and what the hell we’re going to get out of his doing it? It just makes the chills run up my back.”

“It does me too,” said Russell, then chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. “We’re in the quicksands up to our neck, and I just don’t know what the hell to do about it.”

At the time, the government’s stated Vietnam strategy involved sending a few thousand U.S. advisors to help train the South Vietnamese to fight the North Vietnamese. The first U.S. soldiers sent officially for combat arrived on March 8, 1965, and their numbers swelled to more than 500,000, of whom 58,000 died.

Minutes after talking with Russell, Johnson repeated his anxiety to Bundy.

“The more that I stayed awake last night thinking of this . . . it just worries the hell out of me,” he said. “It’s damned easy to get in war. But it’s going to be awfully hard to ever extricate yourself if you do get in.”

Again he brought up the sergeant as an example.

“What in the hell am I ordering him out there for?” he asked. “What the hell is Vietnam worth to me? What the hell is Laos worth to me? What is it worth to this country?”

While historians have written about Johnson’s anguish over escalating U.S. involvement in Vietnam, the tapes offer an intimate portrait of just how painful the dilemma was, said Harry Middleton, director of the library.

“He was clearly tormented by it,” Middleton said, adding that Vietnam was interfering with Johnson’s hopes to enact civil rights and other Great Society legislation.

Although he expressed worries in private, Johnson couldn’t be seen publicly as uncertain, said George Edwards III, director of the Center for Presidential Studies at Texas A&M; University. Thus he appeared publicly committed to expanding the war.

“No president can be seen as vacillating. He had to be seen as prudent, but also as a strong anti-Communist,” Edwards said.