Transcript: Chapter 21

Narrator: In times of stress and tension in his life, Johnson was often struck down by illness. In 1965, he entered Bethesda Navy Hospital for surgery. With ten doctors and three Secret Servicemen in attendance, Johnson had his gallbladder and a kidney stone removed. After a two-hour operation, Johnson went right back to work.

He was never shy about conducting the nation's business from the most unlikely places. He could be earthy and crude, even vulgar. After his operation, he couldn't resist showing reporters his foot-long scar. One cartoonist transformed the scar into a map of Vietnam.

Johnson had gambled his political future and the lives of tens of thousands of men that he could win a quick victory, that when he sent American troops in force, Ho would turn tail and run, but the North Vietnamese refused to quit. Ho resisted Johnson's escalation with an escalation of his own, matching him soldier for soldier.

Four months after Johnson's agonizing decision to send the troops, he received an ominous private report from the man who had argued most fervently for the land war in Asia. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara had begun to have second thoughts.

Larry Berman: In late 1965, we have minutes of meetings in which the Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara tells Lyndon Johnson that "We've been too optimistic. The war can't be won in the period of time that we've thought."

Narrator: Even with six hundred thousand men, McNamara told him, the odds were fifty/fifty that after a year or more there would be a military standoff.

Larry Berman: And I think the evidence is overwhelming that Johnson did not want to hear what the secretary of defense had to say, and from that moment on, the relationship between the two men deteriorated and was never the same.

George Ball: He wanted desperately to be told that things were going well, and he wasn't necessarily getting that advice. Well, I think it shook him a great deal, and I think that he felt that he had gotten a -- he was riding a tiger and he couldn't get off.

Narrator: The White House could keep these internal debates hidden, but there was no hiding what was happening in Vietnam.

Morley Safer, CBS Evening News: This is what the war in Vietnam is all about -- the old and the very young. The Marines have burned this old couple's cottage because fire was coming from here. We're on the outskirts of the village of Cam Ny with elements of the 1st Battalion, 9th Marines.

Narrator: Johnson bridled at what he saw. He knew the power of television and worried about how Americans would react to watching the war in their living rooms night after night.

Safer: Today's operation is the frustration of Vietnam in miniature. There is little doubt that American firepower can win a military victory here, but to a Vietnamese peasant whose home is a -- that means a lifetime of backbreaking labor. It will take more than presidential promises to convince him that we are on his side.

Narrator: Americans began to question the conduct of the war. At first, their numbers were small and Johnson dismissed them, but he could not ignore what was happening in the Senate.

Sen. Frank Church: I still think these principles upon which we rest our policy are subject to very serious questions.

Sen. William Fulbright: Well, I wish -- all I am asking for is clarification of what our objective is in this struggle.

Narrator: February 1966 Senator William Fulbright began to hold televised hearings. Fulbright had guided the Tonkin Gulf resolution through an obedient Congress on behalf of the president. Now he was leading Senate liberals in an anti-war revolt against the White House.

Sen. Church: You can look at the war in Vietnam as a covert invasion of the South by the North, or you can look at it as basically an indigenous war. But either way you look at it, it's a war between Vietnamese to determine what the ultimate kind of government is going to be for Vietnam. Now, when I went to school, that was a civil war.

ABC Announcer: We'll be back with more of the stormy Senate hearings when ABC's Cope continues in just a moment.

Narrator: Johnson was furious. He began referring to Fulbright as "half-bright" and cut him off entirely. Their twenty-year friendship was over. He placed Fulbright and several other Senate liberals under FBI surveillance. Johnson ridiculed his critics. He called them "cut-and-run people with no guts." "They're rather fight me than the enemy." He was beginning to hunker down, isolating himself from dissent.

Tom Paxton: [singing "Lyndon Johnson Told the Nation"] "I got a letter from LBJ | It said, 'This is your lucky day | Time to put your khaki trousers on | We've got a job for you to do | Dean Rusk has caught the Asian flu | And we are sending you to Vietnam.' Lyndon Johnson told the nation |'Have no fear of escalation | I'm trying everyone to please | Though it isn't really war | We're sending fifty thousand more | To help save Vietnam from Vietnamese."

Narrator: Johnson had taken the country into war and kept the American people in the dark. Now, as the fighting escalated, many began to challenge the morality of the war.

Ronnie Dugger: I didn't fully understand why I was opposed to the war in Vietnam. I just knew that it was wrong for a great, proud, abundant nation, technologically superior to anything in the world, going in and crushing a peasant society. In my opinion, it was like a decision to release the furies. I think the thing that the anti-war movement probably didn't understand is that once he had made it, he wasn't going to draw back.

Johnson actively argued with me that he was trapped, that he had tried to do everything to bring peace. "I don't want people to think I'm a coward," he would often say. "I don't want to be the first president who's lost a war." Well, what does it matter if he's the first president who's lost a war that shouldn't be fought anyway?

Anti-War Demonstrations: [chanting] End the war in Vietnam! Bring the troops home! End the war in Vietnam! Bring the troops home!

Narrator: By the summer of 1966, hundreds of thousands of Americans were in Vietnam. Still, his generals kept asking for more. Thousands were dead, Johnson's dream of a Great Society was in danger, and the end was nowhere in sight.