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125 6 “We’re with You, Chief” The Black Press and LBJ Brickbat throwers notwithstanding, we take our stand with LBJ.—Baltimore Afro-American, December 23, 1967 Despite the increasingly sharp antiwar sentiments of certain African American leaders, most notably Martin Luther King Jr., and the parallel growth in opposition to the war among African Americans generally, political support for President Lyndon Johnson among blacks generally remained remarkably steadfast. Throughout his presidency he retained his personal standing among blacks because of his unwavering support of their domestic aspirations. In the immediate aftermath of the Gulf of Tonkin affair in August 1964, Americans still were widely supportive of the Johnson administration’s policy in Vietnam. The action in the gulf involved an unsuccessful attack by North Vietnamese patrol boats on a U.S. destroyer on August 2, 1964, and an imagined attack against two U.S. destroyers on the night of August 4 in the same waters off the eastern coast of North Vietnam. In the overheated political atmosphere after the naval incidents in Southeast Asia, Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, giving the president sweeping powers to meet communist aggression, and triggered the use of American ground troops in a vastly expanded war in Vietnam. The incidents in the Gulf of Tonkin caught 126 Chronicles of a Two-Front War the public’s imagination, ignited a storm of patriotic fervor, and bolstered the president’s poll numbers. Louis Harris reported that LBJ’s approval rating for his handling of the Vietnam conflict went from 58 percent before the Tonkin Gulf incidents to a lofty 85 percent afterward. A plurality that had opposed taking the war to the North Vietnamese before the Tonkin Gulf engagement became a 2–1 majority in favor of all-out U.S. involvement.1 Despite the wide coverage in the mainstream media, the incident in the waters off Vietnam was not big news in much of the black press. One of the black newspapers that did engage the story, the Chicago Defender, supported the president editorially for ordering reprisals against North Vietnam. The Defender observed that the administration had “unquestioned justification for being tough” when faced with the threat “of the communists in Southeast Asia.”2 The Atlanta Daily World put the skirmish on its front page on successive days, showing an early appetite for straight combat stories, a tendency the paper exhibited throughout the war. As was usually the case with such dispatches in the paper, these stories were attributed to UPI. An editorial in the Daily World took a line similar to the Defender’s, applauding the show of muscle in the Tonkin Gulf. The editorial ended with a triumphant note, almost gloating over the lesson presumably given to the ideological comrades of the Vietcong by the U.S. Navy:“We hope the communists of North Vietnam and China are now aware of the futility of their efforts to spread communism.”3 When the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, giving the president broad powers to involve the nation in military operations in Southeast Asia, sailed through Congress with only two dissenting votes, black newspapers largely ignored it.4 U.S. involvement in Vietnam was still a low-profile foreign affair, not yet frequently reported or commented on in the African American press. Judging from the spotty coverage the black press gave to the Tonkin Gulf incident and the ensuing congressional resolution, at this early stage, in late summer 1964, African Americans were probably not particularly interested in events in Vietnam. To be sure, some black civil rights activists had taken notice of the distant conflict. And there was an internal dissonance in an ideology that embraced nonviolence as a solution for domestic injustice, even in the face of violent repression, but condoned violence as a solution for foreign disputes. This incongruity ultimately would lead black advocates of radical pacifism to become vocal opponents of the Vietnam War. However, in August 1964 the complacent acceptance of U.S. foreign policy was more the rule in the African American press. A key reason was Johnson’s position as the“peace candidate”in the fall election . The president had the good fortune to find himself facing a Republican “We’re with You, Chief” 127 who made Johnson’s occasional saber rattling seem docile. The aggressive fulminations of Barry Goldwater were easily and successfully caricatured in Democratic ads that portrayed him as a warmonger and likely to expand the small conflict in Vietnam into a larger war. After...

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