1968 - Mark Kurlansky [6]
In Vietnam, the war U.S. officials were forever telling correspondents was about to end still seemed far from over.
When the French had left in 1954, Vietnam was divided into a North Vietnam ruled by Ho Chi Minh, who had largely controlled the region anyway, and a South Vietnam left in the hands of anti-communist factions. By 1961 the Northern communists had gained control of half the territory of South Vietnam through the Viet Cong, which met with little resistance from the Southern population. That year the North began sending troops of their regular army south along what became known as the Ho Chi Minh Trail to complete the takeover. The U.S. responded with increased involvement though it had always been involved—in 1954 the U.S. had been financing an estimated four-fifths of the cost of the French war effort. In 1964 with North Vietnam’s position steadily strengthening, Johnson had used an alleged naval attack in the Gulf of Tonkin as the pretext for open warfare. From that point on, the Americans expanded their military presence each year.
In 1967, 9,353 Americans were killed in Vietnam, more than doubling the total number of Americans previously killed, which now stood at 15,997, with another 99,742 Americans wounded. Newspapers ran weekly hometown casualty reports. And the war was also taking a toll on the economy, at a cost of an estimated $2 billion to $3 billion a month. During the summer, President Johnson had asked for a large tax increase to stanch the growing debt. The Great Society, the massive social spending program that Johnson had begun as a memorial to his fallen predecessor, was dying from lack of funds. A book published at the beginning of 1968 called The Great Society Reader: The Failure of American Liberalism contended that the Great Society and liberalism itself were dying.
New York City mayor John Lindsay, a liberal Republican with presidential aspirations, said on the last day of 1967 that if the country could not allocate more money to cities under current spending plans, then “the obligations that the United States feels it has in Vietnam and elsewhere ought to be reexamined.”
The U.S. government, involved in an intense race with the Soviet Union to be first to the moon, had been forced to cut back on its space exploration budget. Even the Department of Defense was prioritizing, asking Congress at the first of the year for permission to delay or cancel orders for hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of low-priority military equipment and facilities so that more money would be available to meet the cost of the war in Vietnam.
On the first day of the year, President Johnson launched an appeal to the American public to curtail plans for foreign travel in order to help reduce a growing deficit in international payments, which he blamed in part on the fact that Americans had been going overseas in increasing numbers. Secretary of State Dean Rusk said that tourists must “share the burden.” Johnson asked people to put off nonessential travel plans for at least two years. He also proposed a mandatory curtailment on business investments abroad and a tax on travel that Tennessee Democratic senator Albert Gore called “undemocratic.”
Many in France, where there is an understandable tendency toward a Francocentric view of events, felt that Johnson had taken these measures as reprisal against the admittedly too haughty de Gaulle. The Paris daily Le Monde said Johnson’s proposals were offering Americans an opportunity “to concentrate their resentment on France.”
With the war increasingly expensive and unpopular, U.S. government officials were under intense pressure to make it look better in 1968. R. W. Apple of The New York Times reported:
“I was in a briefing the other day,” a middle-level civilian said, “and the man briefing us came out and said it: ‘An election year is about to begin. And the people we work for are in the business of reelecting President Johnson in November.’ ”
The thrust of this new public relations campaign