Transcript: Chapter 22

Narrator: It was called "the Golden Chalice," the marriage of the president's younger daughter, Luci Baines Johnson. One reporter said, "Nobody was invited except the immediate country." It was August 6, 1966. There was war in Vietnam and riots in the streets, but there was still more Johnson hoped to do. What he wanted was time -- time to build his Great Society. "We can't quit now," he told an aide. "This may be the last chance we have." But time was running out.

Title Card: Part Four: The Last Believer

Over four long, hot summers, riots had become a brutal fact of American life. Johnson looked helplessly on as more than a hundred and fifty cities went up in flames. Detroit was the worst -- forty-three dead, seven thousand arrested, thirteen hundred buildings destroyed. Johnson dispatched army paratroopers and prepared to send his own task force to investigate. As part of the task force, Roger Wilkins was there as the president issued his final instructions.

Roger Wilkins: And he started in a low key. "I don't want any bullets in those guns. You hear me? I don't want any bullets in those guns! You hear me, gentlemen? I don't want any bullets in those guns. I don't want it known that any one of my men shot a pregnant nig -- " and he looked at me and his face got red. I was the only black in the room. "Well, I don't -- I just -- no bullets in those guns." But he was clearly embarrassed, and everybody in the room was embarrassed. So then he told us to go home and pack and get an Air Force plane to go to Detroit.

And as we're leaving, he called me and he said, "Come in here, Roger," and I went into his office with him. And he didn't say anything. I mean, I knew he wanted to say, "I didn't mean to say 'nigger,'" but he meant to say 'nigger.' And I knew he wanted to say, "I apologize." He didn't know how to say it.

And so he walked me over to the French doors that went out to the Rose Garden, and it's the area where Eisenhower had his putting green. And he looked out, and he looked at me, and he looked down, looked out, looked down. There were pockmarks on the floor where Eisenhower's golf shoes had hit the floor. And he finally looked at me, and he looked at the floor, and he said, "Look what that son of a bitch did to my floor!" And then he patted me on the back and said, "Have a nice trip." And that was his way of apologizing. It was very human, I thought.

President Johnson: We will not tolerate lawlessness. We will not endure violence. It matters not by whom it is done or under what slogan or banner. It will not be tolerated. Pillage, looting, murder and arson have nothing to do with civil rights. They are criminal conduct.

Donald Malafronte: The anti-poverty program evaporated in the rioting of '66-'67 and with the pressure on Johnson to establish order in the streets. This was not the man in front of Congress, saying, "We've got to do more"; it was a man concerned and upset and maybe worried about his political future and on the phone to the governor, saying, "Damn it, crack down on those people." What happened was, we were all overwhelmed by the times. So was he.

Narrator: The mood of the country had changed. Many Americans began talking about law and order. Johnson was accused of forcing racial equality and neglecting the needs of middle-class white Americans. He was caught between the civil rights movement and a growing backlash of fear and resentment.

Andrew Young: The country began to get out of control, and President Johnson was no longer in control of the Congress. The economy was creating problems for him, the war in Vietnam was being lost, and unfortunately, I'm afraid that instead of blaming all those forces, he tended to blame us. And the irony of it was that we were probably the best friends he had.

Narrator: On January 5, 1967, Lady Bird Johnson wrote in her diary, "A miasma of trouble hangs over everything." American planes had already struck most of the important targets in North Vietnam by the end of 1967. Several times, Johnson ordered a halt in the bombing and waited for a response from Ho. None came. Johnson's generals thought he was too cautious, staying their hand, preventing them from using America's enormous firepower to force a victory. But Johnson was tormented by a persistent nightmare -- the fear of triggering World War III. "In the dark at night," he said, "I would lay awake, picturing my boys flying around North Vietnam, asking myself, 'What if one of those targets you picked today triggers off Russia or China?'" Johnson spent many hours personally selecting where the bombs should fall.

William P. Bundy: He got more upset about things and more worried about constantly following it, getting the latest statistics, unreliable as we knew they were.

George Reedy: I remember once, in a meeting where the Defense Department was briefing him, and the figures didn't seem to jive to me at all. It sounded to me as though they'd killed ten times as many people as had lived in Vietnam over a period of two centuries. And I slipped him a note, you know, to ask a couple of questions, a practice that we'd been engaging in ever since I worked for him. Boy, I got the dirtiest look. "No more of this." That was the last time I tried it, 'cause I realized it was hopeless.

President Johnson: And since our commitment of major forces in July '65, the proportion of the population living under Communist control has been reduced to well under twenty percent.

Nicholas Katzenbach: I am not sure that he didn't think he was telling the truth. He had a capacity for self-deception about facts that was ten times the capacity of anybody else I've ever met.

President Johnson: And in the contested areas, the tide continues to run with us.

Nicholas Katzenbach: Everything would come around into his way he felt comfortable looking at it, whether that had any relationship to what went on or not.

President Johnson: The campaigns of the last year drove the enemy from many of their major interior bases.

Narrator: When Johnson continued to insist that America was making progress, fewer and fewer people believed him. No one directly accused the president of lying; they called it "the credibility gap."

Doris Kearns Goodwin: He was so used to using words as a means of persuasion to get somebody to do something, so used to talking to seven different people telling them seven different things so that they would all come together to do what he wanted, that lying and persuasion were all part of the same thing for him. And I don't think he even knew the truth. Truth was the action, the product; the means didn't matter, how you got there. But when you're president and you make statements, and those statements are then picked up and they're put on television, you're not just talking to seven different Southerners and Northerners who will never speak to one another. Suddenly, you get this credibility gap 'cause people hold you to your statements.

Narrator: Vietnam has become Lyndon Johnson's war, and the demonstrations turned personal.

Rally Speaker: As Verne stumbled out of that bunker, dazed, with blood on him, he didn't mumble, "Those bastard Vietcong." He didn't mumble, "Those bastard Communists." He didn't mumble, "Those slope-eyed bastards." He mumbled only one thing over and over, "That bastard Johnson. That bastard Johnson."

George Reedy: He didn't understand it. He was totally and completely baffled by it. For one thing, the White House was loaded with very young people, and he would always see them correctly dressed, perfectly groomed, proper. And to him, this must be American youth, and therefore he didn't know who those people were outside the gates. You know, were they extraterrestrial? Where did they come from?

Nicholas Katzenbach: I think he would have been astounded if he had known, when they marched on Washington, that a bunch of kids were sleeping in my house on the floor and a bunch of kids were sleeping in Bob McNamara's house on the floor. We never told the president that our children felt as they did about the war in Vietnam, and he probably wouldn't have understood it. But I think he probably suspected left-wing plots, that sort of thing.

George Ball: He said, "George, don't pay any attention to all these kids on the campus. They'll stomp around and make a lot of noise. What really matters, what is the great black beast that we have to fear, is the right wing."

John Connally: He was frustrated because he couldn't end it and because he thought he couldn't win it. And I kept trying to plead with him to end it, to win it -- to end by winning it. And I said, "You ought to -- if you have to blow Hanoi off the face of the earth, blow it off the face of the earth." He said, "I can't do that. I can't do that. They tell me we're winning. We're going to win this thing. I can't use ultimate power." I said, "Why can't you?" And I said, "I don't care what advice you're getting from whom." I said, "It's too slow. The war's too slow. You're not winning the war, you're losing the battle at home, and it's going to destroy you."

Nicholas Katzenbach: There were no good choices that anybody could devise as to how you were going to get out Vietnam and still have an honorable peace or something of that kind. The choices that you had were all skewed towards, "Do I send in more troops?," "Do I keep the same troops in there?," "Do I do more bombing?," "Do I put on more pressure?," "In what kind of cheap way can I put it on?," "What are the risks of China coming in?," "Should I bomb in Cambodia?" They were all hawkish choices, because there really wasn't anything on the other side that you could devise. We have more than half a million men there. How are you going to get them out?

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.: The bombs in Vietnam explode at home. They destroy the dream and possibility for a decent America. It is estimated that we spend three hundred and twenty-two thousand dollars for each enemy we kill in Vietnam, while we spend, in the so-called War on Poverty in America, only about fifty-three dollars for each person classified as poor.

John Connally: I argued with him a great deal. I said, "You know, you're wrong. You're telling the American people that they can have guns and butter, and," I said, "that's wrong. This war is costing an awful lot of money, and you can't have, you shouldn't have guns and butter."

Sargent Shriver: The War against Poverty was killed by the war in Vietnam -- first of all, because of the lack of money; secondly, it stopped because of preoccupation with the shooting war and the killing fields of that war. Death and destruction and bombing and all that captures the public imagination much more than creating something that's good. Birth is never dramatized like death.