Wise Men Were Wiser Then

The following is an excerpt from Rick Perlstein‘s upcoming book Nixonland: The Politics and Culture of the American Berserk, 1965-1972

The President began to look almost demented. At a March 25th speech to AFL-CIO Building Trades Department, as North Vietnamese troops made their deepest penetration into the South so far, he cried:

“Now, the America we are building”–he paused, and hit the words deliberately for emphasis–“would–be–a–threatened–nation if we let freedom and liberty die in Vietnam…

“I sometimes wonder why we Americans enjoy punishing ourselves so much with our own criticism.

“This is a pretty good land. I am not saying you never had it so good. But that is a fact, isn’t it?”

He pulled himself close to the podium, and stared into the audience, his eyes as wide as saucers.

That night, the bipartisan mandarinate known formally as the Senior Advisory Group began preparing at the Pentagon for a meeting with the President. Among them were advisors who’d steered the course of the Cold War before the Cold War had even been named. The last time the “Wise Men” had met, on November 2, they told the President to stay the course. Now, the head of counterinsurgency briefed them that because Americans had killed 80,000 enemy soldiers, Tet was a famous U.S. victory. UN Ambassador and former Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg questioned his figures. Wasn’t the usual ratio that you could count on four times as many soldiers getting wounded than had died in a battle?

The briefer acknowledged that was so.

Then, Goldberg replied, that meant some 320,000 Communists had been removed from the field of battle. But the general had also told them that the Communists had only 240,000 soldiers. So we’d wounded 133 percent of the enemy.

Another briefer was more forthright. He said progress on the ground in Vietnam would take five to seven years. Clark Clifford asked him if the war could ever be won: “Not under present circumstances.” Clifford asked him what he would do if he were president: “Stop the bombing and negotiate.”

Which was exactly what President Johnson had been going around telling audiences he’d never do.

They met with Johnson the next morning. “Mr. President, there has been a very significant shift in most of our positions since we last met,” McGeorge Bundy began. He raised the name of Truman’s legendary secretary of state, a man to make any Democratic president quiver: “Dean Acheson summed up the majority feeling when he said that we can no longer do the job we set out to do in the time we have left, and we must begin to take steps to disengage.”

Lyndon left, then raged to wise man George Ball: “Your whole group must have been brainwashed!” It was a kind of last gasp. He was finally beginning to get the picture: he had to prepare the American people for the reality of eventual disengagement from Vietnam.

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