Story of Vietnam: pointless
dying demanded by
American political passions

Sometimes the most startling stories barely make it into the
papers. Here's one that ran Feb. 15 on an inside page of The
New York Times. It discloses that Lyndon Johnson, as early
as 1964, viewed the Vietnam War as pointless.

The twist that makes this a tale for a great fiction writer is
Johnson's belief that, pointless though it was, Congress
would destroy him if he tried to pull out. So he didn't, and so
the war destroyed him instead. And gave us all that death.

Here in a baffling tangle of political detail are the elements
of
tragedy: the tale of a man destined to be destroyed, no
matter the choice he makes.

The news story is based on two tapes of Johnson's 1964
telephone conversations, released by the Johnson presidential
library. In one he was talking to McGeorge Bundy, his
national security adviser; in the other, with Senator Richard
B. Russell, chairman of the Armed Services Committee and
one of Johnson's closest friends.

``The biggest damn mess I ever saw,'' Johnson says of the
war on one tape. ``I don't think it's worth fighting for, and I
don't think we can get out.''

Thus Johnson in the spring of the 1964 election year. He
won that election by a landslide while depicting the
Republican Barry Goldwater as a war lover too dangerous to
be trusted with control of the atomic bomb.

Talent for deception may have been Johnson's fatal hubris.
As we know from the Pentagon Papers, the military buildup,
which turned out to be the end of him, was being secretly
planned even while Johnson was running as the peace
candidate.

On one of the 1964 tapes he speaks of a sergeant, father of
six, who ``works for me over there at the house,'' and tells
Senator Russell, ``Thinking of sending that father of those
six kids in there and what the hell we're going to get out of
his doing it it just makes the chills run up my back.''

Russell, then one of the most powerful men in the Senate,
replies: ``It does me, too. We're in the quicksands up to our
neck, and I just don't know what the hell to do about it.''

``They'd impeach a president, though, that would run out,
wouldn't they?'' Johnson said.

In 1964 he had good reasons to think so. These lay in the
long, savage political wars of the 1950s. Starting with their
investigations of Communist influences on the Roosevelt and
Truman governments, Republicans found it politically
rewarding to accuse Democrats of being ``soft on
Communism.'' Richard Nixon was famous for his pioneering
toil in this vein, and Democrats hated him for it forevermore.

By the 1950s antiCommunism had become the glue binding
an otherwise divided Republican Party in brotherhood. And,
oh, how powerful were its juices! The Chinese Communist
victory in Asia, happening during the Truman years,
encouraged Republicans to ask, ``Who lost China?'' Only a
dunce could doubt that the answer was: ``Those
softonCommunism Democrats, they lost China.''

At the same time even more terrifying the Soviets had our
atom bomb. Had probably stolen the secret of how to make
it. Maybe Democrats had made it easy for them, Democrats
not being sufficiently worried about Communism to weed
Red scientists out of our atombomb plants.

Soon more ruthless Republican campaigners were calling the
Roosevelt and Truman years ``20 years of treason.'' Johnson
had lived through all this and seen the party battered for not
matching Republicans in antiCommunist zeal.

And what was the Vietnam War? An antiCommunist
attempt to prevent global conquest by Marxism. In 1964
Johnson had sound reason to suppose that pulling out of
Vietnam just because it was pointless would have terrible
consequences.

The antiCommunist passion of Americans was still too
strong for any president to acknowledge that the Vietnam
game was not worth the medal. After President Kennedy's
death, colleagues said he would have pulled out if reelected
in 1964. Maybe, maybe not. Who knows? What we do
know now is that Johnson realized from the start that he was
marching resolutely to nowhere.

Another decade of pointless dying ensued largely because
longembedded American political passions demanded it.

Russell Baker is a columnist for The New York Times.