Transcript: Chapter 10

Narrator: Far across the world in a small country in Southeast Asia, there were ominous forebodings of a war that would one day consume Lyndon Johnson's presidency.

Larry Berman, Vietnam Historian: I believe Johnson wished he had never heard of Vietnam. He didn't have an interest in Vietnam. He didn't care about Southeast Asia when he first came to the White House, he wishes it had never come to him, but it had. He couldn't pass the buck any longer. This was the great tragedy, really, of his presidency.

George Reedy: I can recall one night on a very long walk with him around the south grounds of the White House where he said that Vietnam was going to be his downfall, that Vietnam was going to give him a role in history that would be very, very negative. ... Vietnam had not figured very prominently in the American press. Most Americans didn't have the faintest idea where it was or why it was there. I know I myself, for instance, when I was a child, I had one of those children's books, Children Around the World. I understood most of it -- a little Dutch boy, a little Dutch girl, a little Chinese boy, a little Chinese girl -- but one page had me baffled. There was a place called Indochina.

Narrator: Johnson didn't start the war in Vietnam, he inherited it. Three presidents before him -- Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy -- had sent American "advisers" and weapons to help fight a nationalist uprising led by Communists. By 1963, 16,000 American advisers were already there.

Vietnam was divided in two. South Vietnam -- weak, corrupt and dependent on American aid -- was fighting the Vietcong, a guerrilla army that received support from the Communists in the North. In the North, Johnson would find adversaries with a will as powerful as his own. They wanted one Vietnam, not two. They had resisted the Japanese and defeated the French. They were not afraid of the Americans. Their leader was a man they called "Uncle Ho."

Ho Chi Minh was a soldier, a politician and a dedicated Marxist -- ruthless when necessary, ready to risk everything to unite his country. To the Vietnamese, Ho Chi Minh was a patriot. To Lyndon Johnson, he was just another Communist.

Less than one month before Johnson became president, South Vietnam was on the verge of collapse.

William P. Bundy, Assistant Secretary of State: President Johnson inherited a Vietnam situation that was deteriorating. The political situation was deteriorating, the military situation was deteriorating. I remember vividly that it was about -- oh, it was the Sunday after he was sworn in that he had a meeting in which he said, "We are going to carry on with this." And that was the theme, continuity. "We are not changing things. We're going to make it work."

Doris Kearns Goodwin: His need to fight that war was out of a whole world view that he shared with a majority of the country, that what Vietnam really represented was a huge struggle in the cold war with the Communists and that if you gave an inch somewhere, somehow they would be taking advantage of that.

Announcer: [U.S. Defense Department Film] The aim of the Communists is to establish control over all of Vietnam and after that, over all of Southeast Asia.

James Thomson, Jr., National Security Council Staff: People got entranced by maps and great red lines sweeping southward and then westward. This great cartographic fallacy in fact seized the minds of men who should know better at the top.

Narrator: Just two days in office, Johnson told an aide, "The Chinese and the fellows in The Kremlin, they'll be taking the measure of us. They'll be wondering just how far they could go. They'll think with Kennedy dead, we've lost heart. They'll think we're yellow and don't mean what we say.

Clark Clifford, Presidential Adviser: President Johnson, in one of his more hyperbolic moods, said he felt we had rather face the threat of Communism in Southeast Asia than face it on the West Coast of the United States.

Narrator: The president turned to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, "the most competent man I ever knew, the most objective man I ever met," Johnson said. The president affectionately called him, "My lard hair man."

Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense: There's no question in our minds but what the Communists have stepped up their rate of attack in recent weeks in South Vietnam.

Narrator: When McNamara proposed an increase in American advisers and covert commando raids against the North, Johnson agreed.

James Thomson: There was a strong sense that Americans were can-do people and that anything we put our mind to we could accomplish and the kind of rural jungle warfare that the Communists were inflicting on us in the Third World -- we could adapt and we could win at it because we were smarter, we had more technology, we had billions of dollars and we would prevail.

Robert McNamara: The government and the people of my country, the United States, stand shoulder to shoulder with the people of yours.

Narrator: Johnson made it McNamara's war. "I want them to get off their butts and get out in those jungles and whip hell out of some Communists," he said," and then I want them to leave me alone because I've got some bigger things to do right here at home."