The Presidency Lyndon Johnson's Personal Alamo

By Hugh Sidey

He could choose a village for obliteration between mouthfuls of tapioca pudding just by thumping a map on his dining-room table in the White House, aides deferential, servants quiet. The killing was half a world away.

When his orders went out he would stay up to count the planes as they came home. If there were stragglers he slept fitfully. "You wake up like an alarm clock at 3:30 to see if they're back." Every detail was flashed to the Commander in Chief. It was his war, just like all those bills up on the Hill were his bills. He tried to run the war like he ran Congress, with bluster and threat one minute, humility and doubt the next. He had the documents in his inner coat pocket, votes on his legislation, the latest body count from Viet Nam.

A reporter's memos of Johnson's nighttime ravings and his daytime remorse and his bafflement about a war that failed to follow his orders are chilling reading, five years compressed into two notebooks with yellowing pages.

"Hell," he said one night early on, "it's just like the Alamo, and you damn well needed somebody. Well, by God, I'm going to go and thank the Lord that I've got men who want to go with me, from McNamara right on down to the littlest private who's carrying a gun."

After he sent in the bombers after the Gulf of Tonkin affair, he said, "I figured that if you go for a fellow, you don't just goose him. We hit a base in North Viet Nam with 25 PT boats." But by June 1964 he was cautious. "People urging stronger steps are not aware of the consequences. I don't feel that we should pull out and come home. As far as going north, we know there are 200 million in the Chinese army. If one little old general in shirt sleeves can take Saigon, think about 200 million Chinese comin' down those trails. No sir, I don't want to fight them."

He wanted to fight, but he wanted the scraps small, on the cheap, on the quiet, done and over in a hurry. Early in 1965 he was mad at everybody. "The let-us-negotiate people are rabbits. I'm being pushed all the time by the big- bomb boys. I took one target off the list the other night because it was too close to Hanoi. But if the South Vietnamese can't protect American installations, we might have to send more Americans over to do the job." More men. More bombs.

By May 1965 he was calm again. "My Viet Nam policy is the three Ds --determination, discussion, discretion. I don't want to drop one more bomb than I need to in Viet Nam. Caution is uppermost in my mind."

So was a souring national mood, and his thoughts were darkening midway through 1965. "I'm not sure that I can lead this country and keep it together with my background." But he had no choice.

"I'm willin' for any solution--religious, political. I'm not going to keep offerin' to negotiate so much because they turn us down each time. It indicates a weakness on our part. I don't know what it will take out there --500 casualties maybe, maybe 500,000. It's the aughts that scare me."

Sometimes Johnson raged at the ignorance of the foe. "They don't realize what they are losing out there. They don't realize what is happening to them. They have no realistic picture of the war." Somebody did not.

By 1966 he was deeply mystified. "I hear the headlines on the radio, see them on TV and read them in the paper. When I hear from the men out there, I sometimes don't believe they are talking about the same situation."

As that year went on, Johnson's manic-depressive swings seemed to speed up. In August 1966: "Our forces will not be defeated. A Communist military takeover is no longer just improbable; as long as the U.S. and our brave allies are in the field, it is impossible." By January 1967 it was this way: "It would be just my luck to have the bombers come over North Viet Nam and the lead plane would be piloted by a boy from Johnson City and he'd put a bomb right down the smokestack of a Soviet ship in Haiphong Harbor."

By then the casualty lists had begun to get heavy. "It is always a strain when people are being killed. I don't think anyone has held this job who hasn't felt personally responsible for those being killed."

Yet pride never died. "The Communists have lost ground while I've been President," Johnson said in the fall of 1967. And there grew the faint hope that maybe the adversary would want to quit fighting and talk, and that, too, always seemed just beyond his reach. "I come to the office thinking Ho has to be on the line. But he isn't, and we can't fool ourselves about Ho. It's like an old cowboy used to say, 'There's no use being poor and stupid all your life when you can buy a pint of whiskey and be rich and smart in an hour.' We can't do that."

He did not understand why and how the enemy fought on. "Just look at the figures and you'll see that they have failed," he said. "Ho's people are just not telling him about his losses. If Tet was a Communist victory, losing 30,000 men, I can only hope that they have many more similar victories."

There were no victories--of any kind, for anybody. "Negotiations?" Johnson asked. "They've given us their answer by their attacks on the cities. We would meet them tomorrow. All they would have to do is drop a line."

And in one melancholy phrase on a dark night in February 1968, Johnson summed up his war that failed. "We're not going to surrender," he said grimly. Just a month later, he decided he had had enough and announced his decision not to seek re-election. So after all, it was the Alamo. Except in the end, Lyndon Johnson's war was taken away from him.