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Emerging not too energetically from passivity, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee opened hearings at which Fulbright, in his opening speech, declared that the country was witnessing a “spiritual rebellion” among its youth against “what they regard as a betrayal of a traditional American value.” With the support of other Senators, Fulbright questioned the authority of the President to “expand the war without the consent of Congress.” Members of the Committee informed Clifford and General Wheeler privately that “We just couldn’t support a large increase in the number of troops in Vietnam—and if we wouldn’t support it, who would?” Called to testify at the hearings, Rusk maintained aims unchanged since Dulles, but admitted that the Administration was re-examining Vietnam policy “from A to Z” and considering alternatives.

The next day, in the New Hampshire primary, Senator McCarthy won an astonishing 42 percent of the vote, and worse followed. Robert Kennedy, recognizing a good thing after someone else had tested the waters, declared himself a candidate. The fiend (in Johnson’s eyes) was in the ring and, given the aura of Kennedy popularity, was a more realistic political threat than Senator McCarthy. With both of them stumping the country as peace candidates, Johnson was now Goldwater, without his sharp convictions. He faced an electoral campaign which would tear apart the Democratic Party and in which he, the incumbent, would be permanently on the defensive, trying to justify a war policy that lacked any shine of success. Where nothing else—not JASON, not McNamara’s defection, not the non-results of attrition strategy, not Tet—had caused him to re-think, where everything only stiffened “cognitive rigidity,” the political prospect penetrated.

It did not shake his resolve about the war, now too rigid to alter, but it raised the humiliating prospect of domestic defeat. At the same time that Kennedy announced, Dean Acheson, whom Johnson after Tet had asked privately for a review of the war effort, brought in his conclusion. After rejecting “canned briefings,” and consulting his own choices of sources at State, CIA and Joint Chiefs, he told Johnson that the military were going after an unachievable goal, that we could not win without an unlimited commitment of forces—just as the Working Group had said in 1964—that Johnson’s speeches were so out of touch with reality that he was no longer believed by the public and that the country no longer supported the war.

This was the judgment of someone Johnson could neither bully nor ignore, whom indeed he respected; nevertheless, he was not ready to be told he was wrong. In the same week he delivered a bellicose speech to the National Farmers Union in which, pounding the lectern and jabbing his finger at the audience, he demanded a “total national effort” to win the war and the peace. He said he was not going to change his policy in Vietnam because of Communist military successes and denounced critics who would “tuck our tail and violate our commitments.” It was a last angry echo of the original vow not to be the first President to lose a war, and it was not admired. James Rowe, the President’s longtime friend and adviser, reported to him that calls came in after the speech from people “infuriated” by his impugning their patriotism and unmoved by his “win the war” oratory. “The fact is,” was Rowe’s hard summary, “hardly anyone today is interested in winning the war. Everyone wants to get out and the only question is how.” Three days later, Johnson suddenly announced the recall of Westmoreland and summoned the deputy commander, General Creighton Abrams, home for consultations with the Joint Chiefs. In the course of the consultations, the decision was taken against sending the additional 200,000 troops, but without any definitive change of policy. The Joint Chiefs’ price was Johnson’s agreement to call up 60,000 for strategic reserve.

To convince the President once and for all of a dead end in Vietnam, Clifford proposed a conference of senior former