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7 1968 Both public and internal pressures were driving Johnson toward a reexamination of Vietnam policy. The events we associate with 1968 really began in the middle of 1967. Johnson received word that the federal budget deficit would be $28 billion , about twice that predicted only six months earlier. Johnson could not continue to wage war and also maintain the Great Society without seeking a tax increase. Humphrey and Arthur Okun, chairman of the president’s Council of Economic Advisors, agreed in a luncheon discussion that Johnson simply could not escalate further in Vietnam and hope to hide the costs from voters and taxpayers. After equivocating, Johnson went to the Congress in August to request a temporary personal and corporate tax surcharge of 10 percent. He also announced a plan to increase U.S. troop levels in Vietnam by 45,000, to 525,000. Representative Wilbur Mills, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee,and Senator Russell Long,chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, both had doubts about a tax increase. Republican senators John Sherman Cooper and Cliªord Case were angry about the plans for military escalation.So,in particular,was Democratic senator George McGovern,who described it as “a turning point.” Representative Tip O’Neill of Massachusetts , a key House Democrat who later would be Speaker, declared the war unwinnable and asked for a U.S. withdrawal. Johnson began grasping for a way out.He asked Robert McNamara and the Joint Chiefs of Staª to bring fresh military pressure on Hanoi, and at the same time explored both formal and informal means to get peace negotiations going. In late August he signaled to Hanoi that he was willing to stop aerial and naval bombardment of North Vietnam if Hanoi would talk in good faith. He temporarily suspended bombing in a ten-mile radius around Hanoi. But he got no response. Late in November the Senate approved without dissent a resolution drafted by the majority leader, Mike Mansfield, to bring the Vietnam conflict to the 58 United Nations Security Council. Johnson nominally had supported the resolution . But he had no intention of asking the UN to intervene. During this same period,Johnson told McNamara,EarleWheeler (chairman of the Joint Chiefs),and GeneralWilliamWestmoreland that they should strike immediately whatever bombing targets they thought worthwhile, because it was clear U.S. opinion had turned against the bombing campaign. (The directive really was superfluous, given that everything on the target list in North Vietnam already had been hit twice over without reducing the flow of manpower and material into South Vietnam.Wider bombings and a naval blockade would have made a diªerence. But Johnson refused to allow them, fearing Soviet reaction.) At the end of the month Johnson informed McNamara —who he thought was becoming frayed and unstable—that he was to become president of the World Bank. He would be replaced as defense secretary by Washington, D.C., attorney Clark Cliªord, a former aide to President Truman who had been a periodic counselor of Johnson’s. Cliªord was not a man compelled by idealism or moved by illusion.He had a strong sense of personal self-interest. He had no tie to previous policy and would shun association with failed ventures. Late in 1967 I received a call from Jim Jones, the president’s assistant, asking that I come immediately to the basement of the White House West Wing. I found myself in a group of perhaps thirty Johnson staª—only the half-dozen most senior were absent.President Johnson told us he had assembled us to thank us for our hard work. He then slid quickly into a story about how, as a young congressional staª member new to Washington, D.C., he had become seriously ill and lay in a Doctors Hospital room. He awoke in a feverish haze, he said, to see a sleeping man seated next to his bed, a cigarette smoldering in his hand.That man at his bedside,he said,was none other than the great representative Sam Rayburn of Texas, who was there because of his loyalty to Johnson’s father. It was loyalty, Johnson said, that separated exceptional from ordinary people. It was loyalty that was called for in the di‹cult times of the moment. Disloyalty, on the other hand, was deplorable and easily recognized. (I thought of Johnson’s velvet-glove, mailed-fist discussion two and a half years before in the Oval...

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