Transcript: Chapter 23

Narrator: The raids over North Vietnam continued until more tons of bombs were dropped on Vietnam than had been dropped during all of World War II. Still, Ho resisted. "Hanoi and other cities may be destroyed," Ho told his countrymen, "but the Vietnamese people will not be intimidated."

James Thomson: The Vietnamese, had we bombed them to the Stone Age, would have gone back into the jungle, waited us out. They knew something that we also knew but didn't acknowledge, and that was that someday we would go home and they could come back and rebuild what we had destroyed.

Sec. Rusk: I think I made two mistakes in judgment. One was that I underestimated the tenacity of the North Vietnamese, and I think I overestimated the patience of the American people.

Narrator: By the end of 1967, a grim sense of siege was settling over the White House. The president dug in. He had spent a lifetime climbing to the pinnacle of power; his whole political life now hung on only one issue -- Vietnam.

Clark Clifford: He decided to call in the men whom he respected most. They became known as "the Wise Men." There were about ten of them. If you put the total service, those men must have had two hundred and fifty to three hundred years of government service.

Narrator: These were the architects of American foreign policy -- Dean Acheson, John McCloy, Averell Harriman. "Contain Communism, don't let it spread" had been their advice to every president since Truman.

William P. Bundy: The picture that was given to them was that we are making slow, grinding progress and we thought we could see, at some point, a break, with the other side really starting to really weaken and go downhill.

Narrator: Dean Acheson said later, "I told him he was wholly right on Vietnam, that he had no choice except to press on."

Clark Clifford: They voted unanimously for him to go on with his course. He was greatly comforted by that.

William P. Bundy: The advice they gave was, "Look, the country doesn't see it the way you're describing it. You've got to develop a way to make your assessments of the situation more credible."

George Ball: Well, they gave him perfectly silly advice. They were sensible people, and why they were so silly, I don't know. Their main advice was, "Well, you ought to improve your public relations." Well, after the meeting, I spoke to Dean Acheson and John Coles and Arthur Dean, and I said, "You old bastards, you ought to be ashamed of yourselves. You're like a lot of vultures sitting on the fence and sending the young men out to die." And I walked out of the room.

Narrator: Johnson had expanded the war in secret. Now he set out to sell it to the American people.

President Johnson: We are making progress. We are pleased with the results that we're getting. I think we're moving more like this and I think they're moving more like this, instead of straight up and straight down.

Narrator: He called home the commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam, General William Westmoreland, for a round of well-publicized meetings and press conferences.

Gen. William Westmoreland: The enemy is being progressively weakened. The Vietnamese armed forces and the government as a whole is being strengthened.

Lee Williams, Aide to Senator Fulbright: The glowing reports always came back from the Pentagon. "Hey, just a little more! We're winning this war, it's almost over, we can see the light at the end of the tunnel."

Narrator: In the middle of December, with reporters and television cameras in tow, the president took off across the Pacific. Johnson was inspired by the photo opportunity, but he was also moved by America's fighting men. "We're not going to yield," he told them, "and we're not going to shimmy."

President Johnson: The enemy is not beaten, but he knows that he had met his master in the field. He is trying to buy time, hoping that our nation ... that our nation's will does not match his will.

Narrator: After just a few hours in Vietnam, the president was on his way to Pakistan and then Rome. It was like a campaign tour of old. Johnson paid a surprise visit to the Vatican, where he assured Pope Paul VI of his desire for peace. His Holiness presented the president with a fourteenth-century painting. The president reciprocated with a foot-high plastic bust of himself.

The twenty-seven-thousand-mile, four-day journey had buoyed Johnson's hopes. He wanted desperately to believe that America had turned the corner in Vietnam, that there was light at the end of the tunnel.

Clark Clifford: And then Tet came. Tet, to me, was the roof falling in.