Transcript: Chapter 25

Demonstrators: [chanting] Hell, no, we won't go! Hell, no, we won't go!

Sec. Rusk: In 1968, it became apparent to us that an awful lot of people at the grass roots had finally decided that if we could not tell them when the war was going to be over, we might as well chuck it.

Narrator: In the midst of his despair over Vietnam, Johnson was forced to cope with the 1968 presidential election.

Sen. Robert F. Kennedy: I am announcing today my candidacy for the presidency of the United States. I do not run for the presidency merely to oppose any man, but to propose new policies.

Roger Wilkins: The thing that the president really hated was the idea that he would be the mistake between the Kennedys, that he would be viewed as the mistake between the Kennedys. He truly hated Bob Kennedy. I mean, he really hated him.

Narrator: "The thing I feared from the first day of my presidency was actually coming true. Robert Kennedy had openly announced his intention to reclaim the throne in the memory of his brother."

Eliot Janeway: Always paranoid, always insecure. His insecurity had grown into a disease, and the insecurity was asserting itself in proclamations and assertions.

President Johnson: We seek not victory of conquest, but we do seek the triumph of justice.

Narrator: In spite of growing opposition to his war policies, warnings from his political advisers, with over twenty thousand Americans dead, Johnson remained adamant.

President Johnson: We seek that right, and we will -- make no mistake about it -- win.

Narrator: By the middle of March, Clark Clifford despaired of ever changing the president's mind. Only one group of Americans might be able to influence him -- those foreign policy experts called "the Wise Men." Five months before, the Wise Men had cheered Johnson with their support. Now, Clifford encouraged the president to meet with them one more time.

Clark Clifford: Although it might sound somewhat conspiratorial, I thought it wise to contact a good many of them first, so I did. I knew them all, I'd known them all for years, and I got a feeling from them. I made four, five or six contacts and found that in each instance, Tet had changed their minds. They all came back; we went through the same process -- reading cables, getting briefed; then we met with the president. They had all turned around. The impact was profound -- so profound that he thought something had gone wrong, and he used the expression "I think somebody has poisoned the well."

Richard Goodwin: He had picked these old Cold Warriors that were still fighting the battle of containment, and he listened to their advice, and as long as they stayed with him, he felt that he must be doing the right thing. Then, finally, at the end, they left him. They all said, "It's not working," and they walked out of the room, and there was Lyndon Johnson all alone with his war, the last believer.

Narrator: March 31, 1968, five days after meeting with the Wise Men, Johnson appeared unusually calm as he rehearsed his speech on Vietnam.

President Johnson: ...to discuss the means of bringing this war to an end. Now, let's have Walt outline the three or four steps we want to ask these folks to do.

Clark Clifford: A week before he was to deliver that speech, he called and said he wanted me to sit in from then on with those who were preparing the speech. But when I got there, the first line of the speech was, "My friends, I wish to speak to you tonight about the war in Vietnam."

President Johnson: Gosh, this is hard to read, Jim. You have no idea. It's just marked up, every word, nearly. You see?

Clark Clifford: On the evening of Sunday, March 31, the first line was, "My friends, I wish to speak to you tonight about peace in Vietnam."

President Johnson: Good evening, my fellow Americans. Tonight, I want to speak to you of peace in Vietnam and Southeast Asia.

Narrator: At first, the speech seemed like many others -- one more pause in the bombing, one more gesture toward negotiations.

President Johnson: Tonight, I have ordered our aircraft and our naval vessels to make no attacks on North Vietnam except in the area north of the demilitarized zone, where the continuing enemy buildup directly threatens our --

Harry McPherson: The day before he made the speech, we had an all-day meeting, and he said, "Have you seen the last part of the speech?" And I said, "No. I think I know what's in it." And he said, "What do you think about that?" I said, "I'm very sorry." And he said, "Well, OK. So long, partner."

Nicholas Katzenbach: He had said, on many occasions, that he might not run again, and I always interpreted this as meaning that he would.

President Johnson: With our hopes and the world's hopes for peace in the balance every day, I do not believe that I should devote an hour or a day of my time to any personal, partisan causes --

S. Douglass Cater: And I remember being torn, literally, fifty-fifty, half of me hoping he would do it -- that is, announce his withdrawal -- and half of me hoping he wouldn't do it.

William P. Bundy: And when he got to what I knew was the end, I got up and said, "Well, let's turn it off and talk about it." And I moved toward the set, and then came the sayonara.

President Johnson: I shall not seek and I will not accept the nomination of my party for another term as your president.

John Connally: I was surprised. I was surprised because I didn't think he'd ever really do it then. Here was a man whose whole life had been politics, everything -- to the exclusion of everything else, really.

Roger Wilkins: I -- I couldn't believe it. It was like a -- it was like a percussion grenade going off in that room, and I was stunned.

James Thomson: I was overwhelmed with exhilaration. It was as if someone had told me I'd won the Nobel Prize. There was hope, suddenly.

Rep. James Pickle: It just broke me in two, because I knew what it meant to him to say it and I couldn't stand it. And three men and I were in a car, and we all began to just openly cry, because it was tearing our heart apart and, of course, we knew what it meant to him.

Narrator: Surrounded by his family, Lyndon Johnson withdrew as a candidate for president of the United States. Three days later, Ho Chi Minh responded. North Vietnam was ready to talk, but the war would go on for another seven years.

Johnson would remain in office 10 more months, a lame-duck president, helplessly watching as the country drifted closer to anarchy than at any time since the Civil War. On April fourth, he learned that Martin Luther King Jr. was shot and killed. Two months later, Robert Kennedy was assassinated. In August, police battled anti-war demonstrators at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. And then, in November, Richard Nixon, the Republican who said he represented the forgotten Americans, the non-shouters, was elected president. "I sometimes felt," Johnson said, "that I was living in a continuous nightmare."

Rep. James Pickle: You knew it was the end of the road for that presidency and all the good things that you had enjoyed, the challenges you'd had and the opportunity to do something, and maybe had done something, for your country. For those of us who were part of the Johnson team, that broke our hearts.

Roger Wilkins: My feelings were so mixed about the man. Well, there was a part of me that never stopped loving him and there was a part of me that hated him, so I didn't know how to respond. And it was mainly sadness, I guess.

Eliot Janeway: Only he, with all of his remarkable gifts and knowledge, could have had a realistic appreciation of the extent of his opportunity and of the extent of both his achievement and his failure.

Robert Dallek, LBJ Biographer: The liberal impulse that went back to the New Deal is challenged, and what you get, beginning in '68, I believe, with Richard Nixon's election, is an era of conservatism. And the irony is, Johnson presides over the extraordinary achievement of liberalism, reaching its zenith, reaching its heights, and then, within three years' time, plunges to its depth from which it still hasn't recovered in the year 1990.

Donald Malafronte: What he wanted was people to love him, and what he wanted to do was to solve everybody's problems himself. And for Johnson, he had no other vocabulary, no other way of thinking about how to help people, other than to have involvement of government in a big way. "Give them a lot of money, put your arms around 'em and love 'em." He was the last soldier in the New Deal war.

Narrator: Congressman, Senator, Vice President, President -- Washington had been his life for over thirty years. Now he was going home to the Texas hill country, where, as his father told him, "The people know when you're sick and care when you die."