Transcript: Chapter 16

Title Card: Part Three: We Shall Overcome

President Lyndon B. Johnson: [1964 Democratic National Convention] My fellow Americans, I accept your nomination.

Narrator: The 1964 campaign had been an absolute triumph. Johnson had been exhilarated by the enthusiastic crowds.

President Johnson: I want for every family what my mother wanted for me: the chance for an honest living, an honorable job, a decent future.

Narrator: He had galvanized the nation with his appeal for racial justice and his vision of a Great Society. At the same time, he had promised not to send American troops to fight in Vietnam.

President Johnson: I have had advice to load or planes with bombs and to drop them on certain areas that I think would enlarge the war and escalate the war and result in our committing a good many American boys to fighting a war that I think ought to be fought by the boys of Asia to help protect their own land.

Narrator: But in Vietnam, the fighting went on. Even with American advisers, the South Vietnamese Army couldn't win the war themselves. Johnson knew they would need more help. "It's going to hell in a hand-basket out there," Johnson had told an aide. "The army won't fight. The people don't know whose side to be on." For months, his advisers were warning him that if he didn't act, South Vietnam would fall. Johnson's vision for America was about to converge with a land war in Asia.

Daniel Ellsberg, Defense Department Staff: On Election Day, I represented the Defense Department in an inter-agency meeting at State Department under William Bundy, considering, essentially, alternative bombing programs against North Vietnam. We didn't wait 'til the day after the election 'cause Vietnam couldn't wait. We just barely made it to the election without bombing.

Narrator: "We don't want to get tied down in a land war," Johnson told an aide. The president's advisers gave him three choices.

William P. Bundy, Assistant Secretary of State: One was to go on as we were doing, accepting that it might readily be that that simply wouldn't do the trick. Then, we had two options that were -- in effect, differed in their pace and their severity: Option B, which would have bombed very heavily or fairly heavily, and Option C, which was a more graduated bombing program.

Daniel Ellsberg: We didn't really consider not bombing North Vietnam. That possibility was mentioned, but only as a straw man. There lies defeat; no one is for that. Johnson's advisers wanted to get us moving on the bombing, and the president was digging in his feet on that. He had to be convinced that that was worthwhile. It gave me a very good impression of Johnson. I had, in fact, the thought that he was the only sane man at that level of the government, that he was asking the right questions.

Narrator: On February 6, 1965, Johnson ordered the bombing of North Vietnam in retaliation for a Vietcong attack on an American military outpost.

James Thomson, Jr., National Security Council Staff: The option he chose seemed to the president, I'm sure, to be the option of restraint. Rather than be cowardly, rather than be a terrible risk-taker, he would apply graduated pressures.

Jack Valenti, Special Assistant to the President: Well, it's like the first olive out of a bottle. Once that happens, the other olives are easy to get out, so once you started bombing, then it became a normality -- always a little bit more, a little bit more, and we can get this war behind us.

Narrator: In March, Johnson ordered continuous and massive air assaults against North Vietnam -- Operation Rolling Thunder. "I knew," he later wrote, "that we were at a turning point." Each step was making it more and more difficult for Johnson to turn back.

James Thomson: I think President Johnson had a unique opportunity to get us out of Vietnam after the election of 1964. Johnson won overwhelmingly. He had promised not to send American boys to die there. He had the mandate and he had four years to do it, but he didn't have the courage and he didn't have the confidence and he didn't have the advice.

Narrator: For every decision, Johnson had had the counsel of the best and the brightest in America, men like Robert McNamara and Dean Rusk, holdovers from the Kennedy era -- "Harvards," Johnson called them. He was a graduate of the Southwest Texas State Teachers College.

Eliot Janeway, Economist, Johnson Family Friend: He labored his life long under the illusion that he was branded for life because he had no formal education. They had gone to Harvard and on to graduate schools, and here was he, and I don't think he ever finished reading a popular pamphlet past page one.

George Ball, Undersecretary of State: I'm sure the fact that he was getting this information from people with such elegant educations was a great comfort to him. They justified his own decisions.

Narrator: The president hoped the bombing would force North Vietnam to the bargaining table. Johnson had no love for what he called "that bitch of a war." "The woman I really loved," he said, "was the Great Society."

Michael Fitzmaurice, Newsreel Commentator: Mr. Johnson proposes an education program that will ensure every American full development of his mind and skills. He says the beauty of America must be preserved as a green legacy, with water and air pollution ended. Beauty of mind, too, must be promoted. Cities should be imaginatively improved, and a broad health program must ensure medical care for the aged and needy.

Narrator: It was a legislative avalanche. No president had ever put so many bills before Congress.

Rep. James Pickle, (D) Texas: History will prove that he was probably the most effective president we've ever had in the White House. Whether you liked him or whether you approved of his tactics or what was actually passed, as far as getting things done, Johnson could do it better than anybody.

George Reedy, White House Press Secretary: When he became president, he decided that he had to get everything done at once because he had checked back and he'd discovered that all the things presidents did, they did during their first couple of years. And so he began to pump things out frantically.

Doris Kearns Goodwin, LBJ Biographer: There was a sense in which laws were being written before people even understood the problems, and you had new agencies springing up overnight. But I think Johnson was afraid that somehow this consensus was going to go away, so he'd better get as much done as he could and we could straighten things out later.

Narrator: Johnson prepared bill after bill: funds for education, elementary, secondary and college, and, for preschool children, Head Start; funds for conservation, clean air and clean rivers, highway beautification, national parks; funds for consumer protection, truth in labeling and packaging, automobile safety. There was urban renewal and housing, public television, the creation of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Arts... The list goes on and on.

President Johnson: And you haven't seen anything yet.

John Connally, LBJ Adviser: I though he passed too much legislation, and he was passing them on right after the other without adequate hearings, without a basic understanding of what the ultimate costs were going to be and how they were going to be administered.