War and Politics by Other Means: A Journalist's Memoir

1968

" WI L D T RIP," says my notebook at the end of it, March 6, I968. Air Force One had just landed at Andrews Air Force Base near Washington, D.C., disgorging its human cargo, President and Mrs. Lyndon Johnson, the chairman and members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, all four-star generals, and a half dozen reporters, representing newspapers, magazines, and television, the White House press pool for the last leg of the wild trip. We had flown in from Ramey Air Force Base, Puerto Rico, having left Washington, D.C., a week earlier, then flying to Houston , Texas, Beaumont, Texas, and Marietta, Georgia. Each time we boarded the two Boeing 707S, one bearing the president, another the press, we were left ignorant of our destination. Each time we figured almost certainly that it would be Vietnam, until we got the straight word after "wheels up." The trip was not only wild. It was bizarre, a function of the tormented whim of President Johnson, himself a hapless victim of events already unfolding in I968. The press pool's task was to travel a bulkhead away from the president on Air Force One, talking with Johnson or his aides and, finally, to brief the other reporters, flying behind on the other 707. This last leg gave the pool something prophetic to relate. It came straight from the president himself and when it did we all laughed. It was inconceivable on March 6, I968, that Lyndon Johnson would not be a candidate for the Democratic nomination to the presidency. So, we were foolish. 9 2 19 68 /93 I had come from Seattle early in January on temporary duty in the Washington Bureau of Hearst Newspapers, a crackerjack news group headed by Bob Thompson, a Capital veteran, and starring Marianne Means and Leslie Whitten. Elsewhere, the nation was in turmoil over Vietnam and growing violent with protests against the war and against racial discrimination. It was already an ugly time. johnson's administration was anguished and uncertain about what to do. We had no inkling that the anguish and uncertainty would accelerate until the November elections; that the wild ride would become a metaphor for one of the wildest years in American politics. Since I was the lone Washington staffer without family to tend, and able to take leave on an hour's notice, Thompson assigned me to the White House beat soon after Johnson began making what he called "surprise" trips. The first of these came on February 18 when the leader of the free world went to Fort Bragg, North Carolina , to tell our soldiers "it is your duty to defend freedom." By that dubious phrase he meant fight in Vietnam on behalf of a U.S. puppet government. There, two weeks earlier, the Tet offensive by Viet Cong and North Vietnamese troops had penetrated the grounds of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon and shattered American confidence in our conduct of the war. It would never be restored. Yet this apparent defeat seemed to brighten johnson's candle. He became more belligerent. His generals called for a U.S. commitment of another 206,000 troops to back the war as a "strategic reserve." News of this quickly leaked into print. Tet was a catastrophe. The North Koreans' seizure of our electronic spy ship, the USS Pueblo on January 23 was a major crisis. The ship's master and crew were imprisoned. Trouble began to avalanche the administration in January. The talented singer Eartha Kitt left Mrs. Johnson in tears at a White House ceremony when she denounced the Vietnam War as a source of the nation's racial turmoil , the force driving young Americans to drop out of school and smoke dope. From the press gallery in the House of Representatives we watched President Johnson walk through his state of the union ad- 94 I 19 68 dress like an actor with bad lines and little enthusiasm. He called for $10 billion for a war on poverty. He looked tired. The newspaper columnists were writing about a feud between the president and Senator Robert Kennedy and, as its corollary, a possible Kennedy run for the Democratic presidential nomination. Why not? Distress over Vietnam, most visible in street protests against it, fertilized American politics in 1968. Out of this came nine serious contenders for the presidency. The themes of their campaigns reflected the conflicting attitudes of...