Hey, Hey, LBJ, Look at Where We Are Today

Whatever happened to Memorial Day? It used to fall on May 30 and represented a solemn occasion for the nation to honor its war dead. Now it’s a way to lock in the last Monday of the month so department stores can have a long weekend of blowout sales. I want to be as patriotic as the next guy, but I find it difficult to concentrate on the war dead while shopping for bargains.

To help me focus on the true meaning of Memorial Day while I nosed my car through the massive malls of Southern California looking for a parking space, I once again played my LBJ tapes. It’s become an obsession. The president’s secretly recorded phone conversations that the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library recently released in response to a court order are an essential primer on the banality of war.

In one cut, Johnson gets into a drawling cracker-barrel chat with his Senate buddy Richard Russell from Georgia about taking the plunge into Vietnam. That was in May 1964, when American troops were still sparsely deployed there.

“I don’t think the people of the country know much about Vietnam and . . . they care a hell of a lot less,” Johnson tells Russell, who reminds him, “I know, but you go sending a whole lot of our boys out there and you will hear something about that.” Johnson broods on that: “Yeah, that’s right, that’s exactly right, that’s what I’m talking about. We had 35 killed, we got enough hell [from the public] over 35 this year.”

In another conversation, Johnson tells his national security advisor, McGeorge Bundy, “It looks to me like we’re getting into another Korea. I don’t see what we can ever hope to get out of there with once we’re committed. . . . I don’t think it’s worth fighting for and I don’t think we can get out, and it’s just the biggest damn mess.” But instead of owning up to a failed policy, Johnson lied to the public about the necessity of a war that never made sense to him or his key advisors. He was convinced he would lose the 1964 election if he appeared soft on communism in Vietnam. “Well, they’d impeach a president that would run out, wouldn’t they?” he asked Russell.

Three months later, Johnson found his main excuse for the war. American ships had reported a possible attack by North Vietnamese PT boats in the Gulf of Tonkin. Johnson rushed to announce his retaliation bombing of North Vietnam in time for the late evening news. In fact, there had been no attack, and once-secret cables now clearly reveal that Johnson was informed of the likelihood of error well before he took that drastic step escalating the war. The captain of the destroyer Maddox had cabled that “it is supposed that sonar man was hearing ship’s own propeller beat,” which he had misinterpreted as torpedo explosions. But, as Defense Secretary Robert McNamara cabled in response to naval officers who recommended waiting before retaliating: “The president wants to go on the air at 11:15 p.m., that is the problem.”

The president concealed this information three days later when he got Congress to pass the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which he cited as equivalent to a declaration of war.

Johnson swept the election that fall, but his Republican opponent, Sen. Barry Goldwater, was right when he said, in a 1980 interview, “I’ll be perfectly honest with you, I think it was a complete phony. I think Johnson plain lied to the Congress and got that resolution.”

Truth was not the only casualty. By the war’s end 11 years later, Lyndon Johnson and his successor, Richard Nixon, had left 58,000 Americans and 1 million Vietnamese dead. But all of that death had brought with it a perverse pride of purpose. They cannot have died in vain, it was once again said. Patriotism came to be defined, as it most often is, not by rational devotion to the security of the nation but as blind allegiance to the folly of leaders without the courage to honestly lead.

I reported from Vietnam and Cambodia during the months when Johnson first revved up the war. Most of the “experts” on the ground knew that Americanization of Vietnam’s civil war made no sense. But they defended it. You couldn’t get out, they said. Think of the consequences--the loss of prestige, the global expansion of communism, the threat to the very existence of the free world. If we don’t defeat the communists in Vietnam, we’ll have to fight them in San Diego, was a thought uttered by more than one ostensibly sane man.

Well, we lost the war, and today we are fighting in Hanoi, against the Japanese and the French, for the right to build Vietnam’s shopping malls.