Increased Commitment in Vietnam

Building the Great Society was President Johnson’s biggest priority, and he effectively used his years of experience in the Senate to marshal legislative majorities in a style that ranged from diplomacy to quid pro quo deals to bullying. In the summer of 1964, he deployed these political skills to secure congressional approval for a new strategy in Vietnam—with fateful consequences.

The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution

President Johnson had never been the cold warrior Kennedy was but believed that the credibility of the nation and his office depended on maintaining a foreign policy of containment. On August 2, 1964, the U.S. destroyer USS Maddox conducted an arguably provocative intelligence-gathering mission in the Gulf of Tonkin and subsequently reported an attack by North Vietnamese torpedo boats. Two days later, the Maddox was supposedly struck again, and a second ship, the USS Turner Joy, reported that it also had been fired upon. The North Vietnamese denied the second attack, and Johnson himself doubted the reliability of the crews’ reports. (The National Security Agency has since revealed that the August 4 attacks did not occur.)

Relying on information available at the time, however, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara reported to Congress that U.S. ships had been fired upon in international waters while conducting routine operations. On August 10, with only two dissenting votes, Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, giving President Johnson the authority to use military force in Vietnam without asking Congress for a declaration of war. The resolution dramatically increased the power of the president and transformed the American role in Vietnam from advisor to combatant.

In 1965, large-scale U.S. bombing of North Vietnam began. The intent of the campaign, which lasted three years under various names, was to force the North to end its support for the insurgency in the South. President Johnson also deployed more than 200,000 U.S. combat troops to South Vietnam. Using the selective service provisions that were in place throughout the early Cold War, many of these troops were draftees. At first, most of the American public supported the president’s actions in Vietnam. Support began to ebb, however, as more troops were deployed and more families became personally invested in the conflict.

Frustrated by losses suffered by the South’s Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN), General William Westmoreland called for the United States to take more responsibility for fighting the war. By April 1966, more Americans were being killed in battle than South Vietnam’s ARVN troops. Johnson, however, maintained that the war could be won if the United States stayed the course, and in November 1967, Westmoreland proclaimed the end was in sight.

The Tet Offensive

However, Westmoreland’s predictions were called into question when the North Vietnamese launched their most aggressive assault on the South in January 1968. During the Tet Offensive, as these attacks became known, the North mobilized nearly 85,000 troops and attacked nearly one hundred cities in the South, including the capital of Saigon (modern-day Ho Chi Minh City). In heavy fighting, U.S. and South Vietnamese forces eventually recaptured all the points taken by the North.

Figure 1. During the 1968 Tet Offensive, North Vietnamese and South Communist rebel armies known as Viet Cong attacked South Vietnamese and U.S. targets throughout Vietnam (a), with Saigon as the focus (b). Tet, the lunar New Year, was an important holiday in Vietnam and temporary ceasefires usually took place at this time. (credit a: modification of work by Central Intelligence Agency)

Although North Vietnamese forces suffered far more casualties than the roughly forty-one hundred U.S. soldiers killed in the offensive, public opinion in the United States turned against the war. Graphic images provided in unprecedented media coverage and disastrous surprise attacks like the Tet Offensive persuaded many that the war would not be over soon. Perhaps the turning point came when respected CBS Evening News anchor Walter Cronkite, based on his own observations on the ground in Vietnam, concluded on television that the war could not be won. In addition, the trajectory of the war raised doubts about whether Johnson’s administration was telling the truth about the real state of affairs.

Anti-War Sentiment Grows

Stalemates, body counts, hazy war aims, and the draft catalyzed an antiwar movement and triggered protests throughout the United States and Europe. With no end in sight, protesters burned draft cards, refused to pay income taxes, occupied government buildings, and delayed trains loaded with war materials. By 1967, antiwar demonstrations were drawing hundreds of thousands. In one protest, hundreds were arrested after surrounding the Pentagon.

Vietnam was the first “living room war.” Television, print media, and open access to the battlefield provided unprecedented coverage of the conflict’s brutality. Americans confronted grisly images of casualties and atrocities. In 1965, CBS Evening News aired a segment in which U.S. Marines burned the South Vietnamese village of Cam Ne with little apparent regard for the lives of its occupants, who had been accused of aiding Vietcong guerrillas.

While the U.S. government imposed no formal censorship on the press during Vietnam, the White House and military nevertheless used press briefings and interviews to paint a deceptive image of the war. The United States was winning the war, officials claimed. They cited numbers of enemies killed, villages secured, and South Vietnamese troops trained. However, American journalists in Vietnam quickly realized the hollowness of such claims (the press referred to afternoon press briefings in Saigon as “the Five o’Clock Follies”). Editors frequently toned down their reporters’ pessimism, often citing conflicting information received from their own sources, who were typically government officials. But the evidence of a stalemate mounted.

In May 1968, with over 400,000 U.S. soldiers in Vietnam, Johnson began peace talks with the North. It was too late for Johnson to save himself, however. Many of the most outspoken critics of the war were Democratic politicians whose opposition began to erode unity within the party. Minnesota senator Eugene McCarthy, who had called for an end to the war and the withdrawal of troops from Vietnam, announced his candidacy for the Democratic nomination before Johnson’s intentions for the 1968 election were known. As a challenger to the incumbent president, the antiwar senator was expected to fare poorly in the New Hampshire presidential primary, but ultimately received nearly as many votes as Johnson. McCarthy’s success in New Hampshire encouraged Robert Kennedy to announce his presidential candidacy as well. Johnson, suffering health problems and realizing his actions in Vietnam had hurt his public standing, announced that he would not seek reelection and withdrew from the 1968 presidential race.

The End of the Great Society

Perhaps the greatest casualty of the nation’s war in Vietnam was the Great Society. As the war escalated, the money spent to fund it also increased, leaving less to pay for the many social programs Johnson promoted to lift Americans out of poverty. Johnson knew he could not achieve his Great Society while spending money to wage the war. Yet he was unwilling to withdraw from Vietnam for fear the world would perceive this action as evidence of American failure and doubt the ability of the United States to carry out its responsibilities as a superpower. Johnson’s dilemma is often referred to as guns vs. butter—that is, whether to use limited resources on defense or social spending programs. Ultimately, Johnson chose guns, reasoning that if he “lost” Vietnam to communism, his political capital would be exhausted and his vision for the Great Society would be stymied.

Vietnam doomed the Great Society in other ways too. Dreams of racial harmony suffered as many African Americans, angered by the failure of Johnson’s programs to alleviate severe poverty in the inner cities, rioted in frustration. Their anger was heightened by the fact that a disproportionate number of African Americans were fighting and dying in Vietnam. Nearly two-thirds of eligible African Americans were drafted, whereas draft deferments for college, exemptions for skilled workers in the military-industrial complex, and officer training programs allowed White middle-class youth to either avoid the draft or volunteer for a military branch of their choice. As a result, less than one-third of eligible White men were drafted.

Although the Great Society failed to eliminate suffering or increase civil rights to the extent that Johnson wished, it made a significant difference in people’s lives. By the end of Johnson’s administration, the percentage of people living below the poverty line had been cut nearly in half. While more people of color than White people continued to live in poverty, the percentage of poor African Americans had decreased dramatically. The creation of Medicare and Medicaid as well as the expansion of Social Security benefits and welfare payments improved the lives of many, while increased federal funding for education enabled more people to attend college than ever before.

Conservative critics argued that, by expanding the responsibilities of the federal government to care for the poor, Johnson had hurt both taxpayers and the poor themselves. Aid to the poor, many maintained, would not only fail to solve the problem of poverty but would also encourage people to become dependent on government “handouts” and lose their desire and ability to care for themselves—an argument that many found intuitively compelling but which lacked conclusive evidence. These same critics also accused Johnson of saddling the United States with a large debt as a result of the deficit spending (funded by borrowing) in which he had engaged.