Transcript: Chapter 24

Narrator: America watched as South Vietnam exploded. On the first day of the Vietnamese holiday known as Tet, the North Vietnamese and Vietcong caught American forces by surprise. Five of the six largest cities and nearly a quarter of the district capitals came suddenly under attack. The illusion of progress was shattered.

Reporter: What's the hardest part of it?

U.S. Marine: Find out where they are, that's the worst thing. You ride around, they run into sewers, in the gutters, anywhere. They could be anywhere. You just hope you stay alive from day to day. I just want to go back home and go to school. That's about it.

Reporter: Have you lost any friends?

U.S. Marine: Quite a few. We lost one the other day. The whole thing stinks, really.

Narrator: The Tet offensive went on for more than three weeks. When it was over, the Vietcong had lost thousands of experienced soldiers and failed to provoke a popular uprising; but by now, Johnson had misled the American people so often that when he told the truth, few believed him.

President Johnson: The biggest fact is that the stated purposes of the general uprising -- a military victory or a psychological victory -- have failed.

Nicholas Katzenbach: There is an instance where the credibility gap really hurt, because I think everybody was convinced that Tet had been a very serious defeat for North Vietnam and for the Vietcong and there was just no way you could persuade the American public that that was the fact.

Walter Cronkite, CBS Evening News: Well, it seems now more certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate. This summer's almost certain standoff will either end in real give-and-take negotiations or terrible escalation.

Narrator: Walter Cronkite, the veteran newscaster who'd been called "the most trusted man in America," once supported the war. Tet changed his mind.

Walter Cronkite: And for every means we have to escalate, the enemy can match us, and that applies to invasion of the North, the use of nuclear weapons, or the mere commitment of a hundred thousand or two hundred thousand or three hundred thousand more American troops to the battle. And with each escalation, the world comes closer to the brink of cosmic disaster.

Narrator: Johnson felt more and more alone. Many of those closest to him had resigned -- his press secretary, his special assistant, his personal aides and advisers. And now, the aide he had called "the most competent man I ever knew, the most objective man I ever met," one of the original architects of the war, Robert McNamara, was leaving. On February 28, exhausted and disillusioned, Johnson's Secretary of Defense said goodbye.

Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense: Mr. President, I cannot find words to express what lies in my heart today, and I think I'd better respond on another occasion.

Narrator: "The pressure got so great Bob couldn't sleep at night," the president said later. "I loved him and I didn't want to let him go, but he was just short of cracking. Two months before, he felt he was a murderer and didn't know how to extricate himself. I never felt like a murderer. That's the difference." March 1, 1968, Clark Clifford replaced McNamara as secretary of defense. Half a million Americans were already in Vietnam, and Westmoreland wanted two hundred thousand more. Clifford confronted the Pentagon.

Clark Clifford: I'd say, "Are we nearing the end of the war in Vietnam?" "We do not know." "Do we have enough men in Vietnam now?" "We do not know." "Is the bombing being effective?" "Well, in a limited way." I got down finally when I said, "Now, what is the plan for victory in Vietnam?" You know what? We didn't have any? It's probably the first time in the career of any of them that we'd ever fought a war in the jungles of that kind. Firepower didn't mean anything. I remember hearing a general who said, "Damn them, they wouldn't come out and fight."

President Johnson: Well, make no mistake about it. I don't want a man in here to go back home thinking otherwise. We are going to win.

Clark Clifford: He was going through an agonizing period. We met daily. I felt it was my task to do everything in my power to persuade the president to change our policy in Vietnam. I needed time to make every effort to reverse the process that had been going on since 1965, you see. It's like a great train: you just can't suddenly put it in reverse. You have to kind of bring it to a stop, starting in at these meetings and, bit by bit by bit, pointing out the disappointments, one after another, that had occurred, the reports that we were prevailing when it turned out that we weren't, and each time hacking away. And by that time, maybe we'd lost twenty thousand men out there, had spends tens of billions of dollars of our country's treasure. It's almost beyond human capacity, at that time, to say, "We've been wrong."

George Reedy: Suppose that you are the president of the United States, and you give some orders and some men get killed. You aren't going to say to yourself -- I mean to yourself, late at night -- "Those men are dead because I was a damn slob and gave some silly answers." What you're going to say is, "My God, those men died in a noble cause, and we've got to see they didn't die in vain." So you send more men to vindicate their death.

Narrator: "Every night when I fell asleep," Johnson said, "I would see myself tied to the ground in the middle of a long open space. In the distance, I could hear the voices of thousands of people. They were all shouting at me and running toward me: 'Coward, traitor, weakling.' They kept coming closer. They began throwing stones. At exactly that moment, I would wake up."

George Reedy: Around midnight, one o'clock, two o'clock, the casualty reports would start coming in. He would wake up automatically and call the Situation Room, or sometimes wander down there, where he could get the direct figures. And the man became haunted by it.

S. Douglass Cater: We were working, it was around nine-thirty at night, and suddenly the president came into the room. And we all stood up, and he said a very strange thing. He said, "Where are you sitting?" Well, he had never asked that question before. He would sit down in any chair that he wanted to, and we would reseat ourselves to accommodate where he was sitting. But we found a seat for him and he sat down, and he just looked, like, sunk. And he said, "I don't know what to do. If I put in more boys, there'll be more killing. If I take out boys, there'll be more killing. Anything I do, there's going to be more killing." And he just sat there and then he got up and left.

Demonstrators: [chanting] Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today? Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?

Jack Valenti: The presidency became a burden that each day became more difficult to bear. The furrows in the face were deeper. The eyes were sadder. And it was almost visibly apparent that this war was breaking this extraordinary, formidable man who had never been broken before.

Ronnie Dugger: With the turning of the country against him, his entrapment in the war, his inability to win it without simply wiping Vietnam off the map, I thought Johnson had become somewhat unstable.