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By Root 938 0

and the SEATO neighbors to reassure the region of American support. The Vice-President’s interest in and experience of foreign affairs were minimal. When forced to pay attention as Senator and Majority Leader, he adjusted his attitude to fit conventional cold war orthodoxy. Although foreign affairs were not for him a major concern—Johnson’s major concern was the advancement of his own career—the cold war dogma organized his impressions and reactions. His public pronouncements were addressed to the lowest common denominator of the public, as when in Saigon he announced that Diem was “the Winston Churchill of Asia.” Less fatuous, his report to the President was manfully interventionist. He was ready for the United States to shoulder the burden of responsibility for Asia. “The key to what is done by Asians in defense of Southeast Asia’s freedom,” he wrote, “is confidence in the United States. There is no alternative to United States leadership in SEA. Leadership in individual countries … rests on the knowledge and faith in United States power, will and understanding.” While his words may show a profound ignorance of what leadership rests on in Asia, they perfectly express the sense of omnipotent capacity with which the United States emerged from World War II. We had crushed the war machines of Germany and Japan, crossed oceans to do so, restored Europe, ruled Japan; we were a Paul Bunyan straddling two hemispheres.

“I recommend,” Johnson continued emphatically, “that we move forward promptly with a major effort to help these countries defend themselves.… I cannot stress too strongly the extreme importance of following up this mission with other measures, other actions, other efforts”—presumably military. With realism he was not always to retain, he advised that the decision “must be made in full realization of the very heavy and continuing costs in terms of money, of effort and of United States prestige,” and that “At some point we may be faced with the further decision of whether we commit major United States forces to the area or cut our losses and withdraw should our other efforts fail.”

He warned, “There is no mistaking the deep and long-lasting impact of recent developments in Laos … which have created doubt and concern about the intentions of the United States throughout Southeast Asia.” With no experience of Eastern habits of speech that conceal a kernel of substance—or sometimes no substance—under voluminous wrappings of form, Johnson took all he was told at face value, urging that it was of “the first importance” that his mission “bear fruit immediately.” He proposed that the “real enemies”—hunger, ignorance, poverty and disease—be combatted by “imaginative use of American scientific and technological capacity” and concluded, “The battle against Communism must be joined in Southeast Asia with the strength and determination to achieve success there—or the United States must inevitably surrender the Pacific”—here he threw away 6000 miles of ocean together with Okinawa, Guam, Midway and Hawaii—“and pull back our defenses to San Francisco.”

It was a mixed bag of characteristic American ideas. The simplistic either/or about defeating Communism or surrendering the Pacific probably did not influence the President, who was out of sympathy with his Vice-President and vice versa. But the doubts of America’s steadfastness that so affected Johnson raised the issue of credibility that was to swell until in the end it seemed to be all we were fighting for.

Credibility emerged in the Berlin crisis of that summer when, after a harsh and intimidating meeting with Khrushchev in Vienna, Kennedy said to James Reston, “Now we have a problem in making our power credible, and Vietnam looks like the place.” But Vietnam was never the place, because the American government itself never totally believed in what it was doing. The contrast with Berlin was only too plain. “We cannot and will not permit the Communists to drive us out of Berlin either gradually or by force,” Kennedy said in July, and he was ready in his own mind, according to