The March of Folly_ From Troy to Vietnam - Barbara Wertheim Tuchman [223]
As delivered, Johnson’s public address was noble and open-handed. “We are prepared to move immediately toward peace through negotiations. So tonight, in the hope that this action will lead to early talks, I am taking the first step to de-escalate the conflict … and doing so unilaterally and at once.” Aircraft and naval vessels had been ordered to make no attack on North Vietnam north of the 20th parallel, but only in the critical battlefield area at the DMZ, “where the continued enemy build-up directly threatens allied forward positions.” The area to be free of bombing contained 90 percent of the Northern population and the principal populated and food-producing areas. The bombing might be completely stopped “if our restraint is matched by restraint in Hanoi.” Johnson called upon Britain and the Soviet Union, as co-chairmen of the Geneva Conference, to help move the unilateral de-escalation toward “genuine peace in Asia,” and upon President Ho Chi Minh to “respond positively and favorably.” Making no mention of an assumed rejection by Hanoi or of a return to combat by the United States thereafter, he looked forward to a peace “based on the Geneva Accords of 1954,” permitting South Vietnam to be “free of any outside domination or interference from us or anybody else.” No reference was made to the requested addition of 200,000 men; the possibility of future escalation was left open.
After a moving peroration about divisiveness and unity, Johnson came to the unexpected announcement that electrified the nation and a good part of the world: that he would not “permit the Presidency to become involved in the partisan divisions that are developing in this political year,” and accordingly, “I shall not seek and I will not accept the nomination of my Party for another term as your President.”
It was abdication, not in recognition of a dead end in the war or abandoning combat but in recognition of a political reality. Johnson was a political animal to the marrow of his bones. His unpopularity was now patent, dragging down with it the Democratic Party. As the incumbent President, Johnson was not prepared to have to struggle for and quite possibly lose re-nomination; he could not suffer such humiliation. The Wisconsin primary, in a state loud with student protest, was scheduled for 2 April, two days ahead, and field agents had telephoned blunt predictions that he would run behind Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy. And so with righteous words about “divisiveness among us all tonight,” and his duty to bind up wounds, heal our history, keep the American commitment and other commendable restorative tasks, he took himself grandly and in good timing out of the contest.
Three days later, on 3 April 1968, Hanoi astonished its opponents by announcing its readiness to make contacts with representatives of the United States with a view to determining “unconditional cessation” of the bombing and all other acts of war “so that talks might start.”
The 22-year folly since American troopships brought the French back to Indochina was now complete—though not finished. Five more years of American effort to disengage without losing prestige were to compound it. In paucity of cause, vain perseverance and ultimate self-damage, the belligerency that Johnson’s Administration initiated and pursued was folly of an unusual kind in that absolutely no good can be said to have come of it; all results were malign—except one, the awakening of the “public ire.” Too many Americans had come to feel that the war was wrong, out of all proportion to the national interest and unsuccessful besides. Populists like to speak of the “wisdom of the people”; the American people were not so much wise as fed up, which in certain cases is a kind of wisdom. Withdrawal of public support proved the undoing of an Executive that believed it could conduct limited war without engaging the national will of a democracy.
6. Exit: 1969–73
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