 Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Mr. Mark K. Uptegrove, Director of the LBJ Presidential Library. Good afternoon, and welcome to the Vietnam War Summit. On May 22, 1971, as a crowd assembled on the University of Texas grounds to dedicate the LBJ Presidential Library, 2100 anti-war protesters were kept from interrupting the proceedings by a phalanx of highway patrolmen and Texas Rangers. Still, their chance of no more war carried by high winds and accompanied by the pounding of trash can lids were clearly heard by former President Lyndon B. Johnson and his assembled guests, including then President Richard M. Nixon. It was an apt metaphor. The Vietnam War had filtered virulently into the administrations of Johnson and Nixon, just as it had that of John F. Kennedy and would that of Gerald R. Ford. When Johnson took his turn at the podium to inaugurate the library, he proclaimed, it's all here, the story of our time with the bark off. There is no record of a mistake or an unpleasantness or a criticism that is not included in the files here. Accordingly, he wanted his library to reflect not only the triumphs of his administration, but of the failures too, and he wanted us to learn from them to build a better America. Two years ago, the LBJ Presidential Library hosted the Historic Civil Rights Summit to mark the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which LBJ had championed and signed into law. Four U.S. presidents attended the conference, President Obama and former Presidents George W. Bush, Clinton and Carter, along with many civil rights heroes who paid tribute to LBJ's legacy on civil rights and those who waged the Seminole Civil Rights Movement. But just as we celebrated the feat of civil rights, it is altogether fitting that we, in keeping with President Johnson's vision for his library, take a substantive, unvarnished look at the Vietnam War, another important aspect of his legacy. Our goal is to shed new light on the war and its lessons and legacy. It is also our intent to recognize the courage and sacrifice of the men and women who served in Vietnam. The dark cloud of the Vietnam War hung dolefully over America, well after the last shots were fired and the din of protests had faded over four decades ago. But the passage of years offers greater perspective and an opportunity to elucidate the complexities of a war that altered not only our history, but our perception of ourselves as a nation. To look at it with the bark off may help us to move on stronger and more united. That would have been President Johnson's hope just as it remains ours. We open the summit this afternoon with a series of three panel discussions. In our first Commanders-in-Chief, we will explore the role our Presidents played in the war and how their leadership affected its outcome. It's my pleasure to introduce its participants. H.W. Brands is the best-selling author and professor of the University of Texas at Austin, where he holds the Jack S. Blanton Senior Chair in History. Several of his books have been bestsellers and two, Trader to His Class and the First American, were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. Alexander Butterfield joined the Air Force in 1949 and commanded a squadron of low-level reconnaissance aircraft in the Vietnam War, for which he was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross. He went on to serve as Deputy Assistant to President Richard Nixon from 1969 to 1973. After serving the White House, Alex was appointed as the Administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration. Tom Johnson was the first in the first class of White House fellows in 1965 and remained there for the balance of President Johnson's administration to serve as his assistant. Tom went on to become Chief Executive Officer for two of America's most respected news organizations, CNN and the Los Angeles Times. He currently serves as Chairman Emeritus of the LBJ Foundation Board of Trustees. And finally, moderating today's discussion is Brian Sweeney, who became Editor of Texas Monthly in 2014. In over two decades with the magazine, he has served in many roles, including as Director of the magazine's political coverage. Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming to the stage Bill Brands, Alex Butterfield, Tom Johnson and Brian Sweeney. Thank you to all of you for being here. My name is Brian Sweeney. It is an absolute honor to be part of this conference and to be part of this conversation with this distinguished group. I will say that I take particular pride in having been fortunate enough to have been part of the Civil Rights Summit two years ago and experiencing that and the wonderful conversation, how much we learned in the community coming together to be part of this. I'd like to pay a special welcome and thanks to the great patriots who are here today in the audience who had served in the military overseas. To those men and women, I say thank you for being here today and being part of this conversation. The title of our panel for which I'm here with Alex and Tom and Bill to discuss is to give an overview of what role the leaders in the White House play to the decisions that they made that shaped American foreign policy post-World War II and certainly our growing and deeper involvement in Vietnam. Certainly, we're going to look at that through the lens of the Johnson and Nixon administrations as Alex had served in and as Tom has served in, but it would also not be right, I think, to begin this conversation without trying to frame this discussion of the deep roots that this country had played in involvement in Southeast Asia. And for that, we actually have to go back to the global realignment after World War II and all the way back to the administration of President Truman. And for that, I thought I would open up Bill with you if that's okay as the award-winning and noted historian on our panel. Just to give us a sense of what the world was like starting back then. What were the chain of events that came forward that then would have put pressure on subsequent administrations to give us a sense of how leaders were thinking at that time? There were two movements that came out of World War II that collided to give American involvement in Vietnam. The first was the anti-colonial movement, the nationalist movement in large parts of Asia and Africa, where countries that have been colonies of the European powers wanted their independence. And World War II taught them that they could. They could demand independence and they could expect to achieve it. So that was one aspect of what would be the long-running Vietnam War. The second aspect was the emerging Cold War. And the Cold War pitted the United States and its allies in the philosophy of democracy against the power of the Soviet Union and its allies in the philosophy of communism. If either of these movements had been in existence alone, then American involvement in Vietnam would either have not occurred or would have occurred quite differently. The problem for American presidents, Harry Truman first, Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, and then Johnson, Nixon and Gerald Ford, the basic problem was that in American history, the United States has typically supported anti-colonial nationalist movements. And to the extent that Ho Chi Minh was leading a nationalist movement in Vietnam, the United States was inclined to support it. And because the United States had supported Ho Chi Minh during World War II, Ho Chi Minh and the Vietnamese nationalists thought they had some expectation of American support after the war. But the problem was that they were not simply nationalists, they were communists. And although being communists was not a disqualification during World War II, after all, the United States had allied with the Soviet Union, the homeland of modern communism. But as the Cold War developed, American presidents felt it necessary to distance the United States from anything that had communism attached to it. So Harry Truman in 1947 gave a speech in which he outlined the Truman Doctrine that essentially said that the world was divided into two spheres. There's the sphere of democracy and the sphere of communism. And if you're on the communist side, we're against you. Now Truman was not thinking about Vietnam at the time, he was thinking about Greece and Turkey. But he laid this philosophical basis for American intervention against the communist movement in Southeast Asia. The Korean War broke out in 1950, and this was not about Southeast Asia, it was about Northeast Asia. But because it seemed to heighten the threat of communism in Asia, Truman gave an order that American aid, which to that point had been flowing through the French and finding its way to Indochina, would go directly to Indochina. So that's the point when the United States first gets involved in Vietnam in a direct way. And the United States has taken the position that it is supporting the anti-communist forces in Vietnam. Dwight Eisenhower becomes president in 1953. Eisenhower had the opportunity, he had the temptation to get more deeply involved, but partly because Eisenhower was a military guy and understood what military force can accomplish and what it cannot accomplish. He contended himself, he kept his distance. The United States still supported the new government of South Vietnam economically and with military aid, but didn't send troops. Eisenhower leaves office, John Kennedy is now president. By this time, the force of the revolution in Vietnam is gaining strength. And Kennedy, lacking Eisenhower's military credentials, felt greater pressure to follow the advice of his military advisers who said, we need to send military force, greater military force into Vietnam, or we will risk losing Vietnam to communism. I'll stop here, but just say one thing. The premises on which the United States initially sided with the anti-communist forces in Vietnam were an artifact of the 1940s. When it was not outlandish to believe that communism was a unified threat to the United States, that a victory for communism anywhere was a threat to democracy everywhere. By the 1960s, that was coming into question. But because Harry Truman and then Dwight Eisenhower and then John Kennedy had laid down this marker, the United States is opposing communism in Southeast Asia, then the presidents who followed Johnson, Nixon, Ford felt obliged to live up to that promise. I just want to reinforce what has just been said. I especially would like to urge you to read a book called The Brothers. It is, I think, the finest book on how we got to where we were and to some extent where we are is in the story of Alan Dulles and John Foster Dulles. John Foster Dulles actually rejected and overture from Ho Chi Minh to try to look at ways that perhaps we could work together the United States and that government and he was forcefully rejected on our side, The Brothers. Tom and Alex, I would like to ask you, sort of given the political service that you had, but I am curious, before you both entered the White House or working in the White House, Alex, you had been a military advisor to Secretary McNamara for White House affairs in the Johnson administration, but before that obviously you had been a veteran and you had served overseas. Before you came into the crucible of the White House, I'm curious to get a sense of what were your personal opinions about the conflict or American foreign policy in general before then you were in a position to be working close to presidents and be part of decisions or certainly helping shape decisions. I'm just curious from a personal point of view to help confirm what Bill was saying. Well, in my case, I had three years of junior ROTC at Lanier High of Hawaii and Macon, Georgia and four years of senior ROTC at the University of Georgia and Athens and I think like so many of us, particularly those of us in the South, I felt a special obligation to serve. I also felt that presidents do the right thing. I really had this strong belief that our presidents do what's right for the nation. Alex? Well, I know that presidents certainly want to do the right thing. Being human, they all try hard. My Vietnam experience really began in the fall of 1959. I was the senior aide to a great guy named Rosie O'Donnell. He was a four-star Air Force Commander-in-Chief of Pacific Air Forces. So we were home based in Hawaii and he said to me, one of your jobs, Alex, will be to see to it that we never stay on this island more than 30 days. We were based in Honolulu, as I may have said. And our beat was the Far East. The headquarters for the Far East had been in Japan earlier. So over a 33-month period, we made eight or nine trips a year to the Far East and the Philippines and we almost always hit Vietnam because of its importance at that time. So this is 59. And I'd say from 59 to when I left working for Rosie O'Donnell, which was May or June of 62, we visited there at least 22, 23 visits. And on each visit, we would meet with, I think our ambassador then was Fred Nolting and President Xi'en with one or two of his aides from the President's staff. General or two, big men, little men, medium-sized men, there are a lot of men, all generals, and Fred Nolting and General O'Donnell and May. I was like a fly on the wall. I had no expertise, no reason to be there, but I was in all of those meetings. And I remember that early flavor now, that's just 59, 60, 61, a little bit of 62. The news was never Rosie. It was always, there'd been a surprise attack. The supplies were still coming down the Ho Chi Minh Trail. There was no way of stopping them, it seemed. They needed a more modern type of aircraft. So on each occasion, we would promise, that's the way I remember it, I'm sure, on every one of these visits, we didn't promise something new, but we'd give them a more advanced trainer or some other kind of light airplane or not a very fast combat airplane. Because in this jungle warfare, everything was different and radius of turn meant everything. And in an airplane, the slower it is, meaning usually the smaller it is, the less power it is, the better the radius of turn. And you can operate better over the ground forces and that's usually what you're doing. So that's what we did. We gave them a T-28s at one time. And then on the next visit, it wasn't working out very well and that we had said, no American pilots will be in the T-28s. They'll be all Vietnamese. Then we said, okay, well, we'll let American pilots be in the back seat, but they can't touch the controls. And then on the next meeting, that's the way it progressed. Right, right. Incremental involvement, incremental decision making. And when we left, it was always like, damn, I mean, what are we going to do? We recognize it as an ongoing problem. And this of course led right into the best and the brightest era. I don't want to get ahead, but that's when I knew this guy. We were on the phone all the time. Not to solve the problems in Vietnam, but just talking, he was over in the White House and I was in the Pentagon. But that's when the best and the brightest were doing their damnedest with this thing, trying to figure it out. No one could really get a handle on it. And one more thing I'll say is what our problem was, we just underestimated, there was a little arrogance to this too, to our position. We just could not understand, we didn't know they had the resolve they had or the persistence they had, the determination. The North Vietnamese. The North Vietnamese, the Viet Cong, who were the communists in the South, and the Viet Minh, who were the communists in the North. That's right. Well, you said two things there that I'd like to key off of and I'll just open this up to the panel in general. But in an effort to live up to this aspect of the panel to try to get inside the heads of the presidents, what were they thinking at the time? What was the information that they had? What were the best options available to them? What personal biases or thoughts that they bring to the table? I want to jump off of two things. One, you said that we could never quite get a handle on it. And that's one thing that I want to sort of explore a little bit is this notion of were the presidents ever really able to control the events or did the events control them? Were they able to make proactive decisions or make reactive decisions? The other thing you had mentioned, President Diem, and I think that's interesting because if you think of the national tragedy that the United States suffered with the assassination of President Kennedy and President Johnson suddenly coming in into the fore, certainly he already had his eye on certain things, incredibly important things, civil rights, certainly the tax bill that had been languishing, but also managing events in Vietnam, particularly with the coup that had happened about a month before him taking office, that the United States was aware of or backed or certainly had approved of or however that gets defined. I think the question that I would say to the group is, can you put yourself inside President Johnson's head and begin thinking about how was he handling all of this information and what decisions did he want to make? What options were available to him, Tom? I want to clarify for the audience that my role during those years was primarily that of a note-taker. And during the past six weeks with the help of a young Georgia Tech senior, Parish McCall, who's with me today, I have gone through several hundred of the notes that I took. My notes were transcribed, were sent to the LBJ library, and it has taken almost 50 years for me to get all of them. Many of them are excerpted significantly. There have been deletions made by CIA and others in it, but I am relying on my notes. This is only a small portion of the notes in answering this question. I don't want to count on my memory first about Vietnam. LBJ was terribly conflicted. He had Senator Russell of Georgia, the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, and others who had advised him not to get into a ground war in Asia. He had many others who believed that we had the Southeast Asia Treaty, CETO, that we needed to respect. That was a treaty that bound us to come to the defense of the nations that were signatories to it. Lee Quang Yu, who was then the leader of Singapore, conveyed clearly that he felt that all of Southeast Asia could fall if America did not protect South Vietnam. You've heard much about the so-called Domino Theory, but it was the view of many people at that time that it was more than a theory. Lee Quang Yu being, I think, the leader of it. Now we're getting feedback if that can be brought down. President Johnson always worried about China and worried about Russia intervening on the side of the North Vietnamese, always. Particularly if the United States accidentally bombed Russian or Chinese ships in the Hanoi or Haifeng Harbor. In fact, he often said it will be a young pilot from Johnson City, Texas, who will accidentally start World War III. The experience of Korea, where the Chinese came down in mass to support the North Koreans and Kim Il-sung was constantly with him in the worry that pilots might invade the Chinese airspace. It was there. LBJ anguished about that war every single day, and that is not an overstatement. The daily body counts. The calls either to or from the situation room, often at two or three o'clock in the morning to see if the carrier pilots had returned. A regular Tuesday lunch meeting that almost always consisted of the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of State, the CIA Director, the National Security Advisor, the Press Secretary, and a note-taker. Specific bombing targets were reviewed with him. He did not want to bomb the dykes. He did not wish to bomb the cities. He did not wish to bomb the food sources. Only military targets for quite a while. Deeply personal, he had two sons-in-law, Patrick Nugent and Chuck Robb in combat zone areas, letters and tapes that were sent back to Lucy and to Linda were, at times, confiscated by President Johnson or one of us. And he would listen to those tapes. On one occasion, he said that the best reporter he thought he had in Vietnam at the time was then Marine Captain Charles Robb, whom we honor here today, Chuck. And then finally, he said more than once, I am damned if I do, I am damned if I don't. As he considered troop escalations, bombing halts, bombing intensification. Through it all, he wanted his commanders in the field, especially General Westmoreland, to have the troops and the munitions that he needed until with 500,000 troops on the ground, U.S. troops on the ground, General Westmoreland in 1968 asked for 200,000 more. And at that point, with the advice of particularly a group of wise men he assembled and within Secretary of Defense Clark Clifford, he said he would not approve that request. I guess if you thought about what was his biggest single worry in the war, it was that we might have another Dinh Vinh Phu, the occasion when the French were overrun by the North Vietnamese forces in a tragic situation where that base, the loss of that base, led in many ways to the French losing that war. Que sign was in such grave danger in 1968 with divisions of North Vietnamese troops assembled in the area. And I guess I had to look at my notes. The one that troubled me the most at the time I was sitting in the room was that there actually was developed a contingency plan for the possible use of tactical nuclear weapons. And in fact, my understanding from some of the interviews that I have seen in red, I mean, close confidants to President Johnson, Governor Connolly, for example, among them had suggested to him that you win the war by winning it. And if that required the use of tactical nuclear weapons, so be it. So certainly there was a wide range of advice, which is very chilling. I can assure you from being in the room that President Johnson never, I think, would have used nuclear weapons. In fact, he demanded a written letter from all members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a formal written document which is here in this library from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, assuring him in writing that Que sign would not be overrun, that we had adequate forces to defend it, and we actually had placed a new weapon that was a fragmentation weapon that was used that had much like the type of weapon that we read about today, the so-called barrel bomb, that blows into a million bits and all the people in its path are blown into a million bits, but that was placed into the troops around Que sign. I'd like to emphasize the importance of one of the things that Tom Johnson just said. When Lyndon Johnson took off the table, the possibility of invading North Vietnam, he basically ensured that the United States could never definitively win the war. It had to keep fighting to avoid losing the war, and Johnson did this for a very good reason because he was in the Senate in 1950 when Harry Truman had allowed the invasion of North Korea, which had brought China into the war, and it was scary enough when China came into the war in 1950, the Korean War in 1950, but by the 1960s, China had nuclear weapons, and so if the United States found itself directly up against China in the middle of the 1960s, it could very easily have been World War III, and that's something that Johnson definitely wasn't going to go. He wasn't going to go there. I wonder if we have already moved the conversation forward to agree of sort of escalation and a full commitment to a land war in Southeast Asia, but I do wonder if we could come back maybe to sort of an earlier part of the administration, the momentous summer, for example, of 1964 where President Johnson has not yet run for election. He's being very careful about how he is handling things, though he has already moved ahead with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the tax bill, but I think from a foreign affairs standpoint, particularly with Vietnam, it was a little bit trickier to manage. That's the summer that we had the Gulf of Tonkin incident, and I wonder if you might talk about that handling and did that set the stage for something in terms of the way that we were explaining to the American people as to what was happening or what was not happening. What later became known as in the Johnson administration the credibility gap, but an erosion of the America's belief that what they were hearing is accurate, which certainly manifested itself after the Tet Offensive, for example, that the American people were not going to believe, despite being told that ultimately this was not a military victory for the North or for the Viet Cong, that it was very difficult to accept that at that point. But is it possible to go back to those foundational decisions in the White House prior to the election and the victory over Barry Goldwater as to how you begin processing this? You're a president, but maybe not fully president. You're still very much in President Kennedy's shadow in the sense of wanting to, as he said, fulfill some of the legacies that he had set forth and didn't want to run from any commitments at that point that President Kennedy had set forth? I was not there. I was described in 65. And so all of my information is based on the records that are here, the records that are at the Pentagon, the records that are at the National Archives. Clearly, the Tonkin incident played a significant role in the decision to dramatically increase. And I think we will all go to our graves with different versions of that event. One of President Johnson's most senior aides, Larry Levinson, a very highly trusted attorney, reviewed that. He worked then for Joe Califano at the Pentagon. But to understand the decision-making process and the politics of that time, I mean with Senator Goldwater taking such very strong military positions, which as you know, answered by the little girl pulling the petals from the flower as a nuclear cloud erupted in the background. But you had this incredible group of people who just felt we'd been successful in virtually every war. I mean, America's military power prior to that was just so awesome that it was unbelievable. And still we had the capability, which incidentally we never released fully in Vietnam. But there were, of course, with the political statements that President Johnson made about not sending American boys to fight a war that should be fought by the Vietnamese boys. That was a significant part of the credibility issue that we later confronted. You're the expert. Well, Lyndon Johnson was a grudging cold warrior and a reluctant commander-in-chief. Lyndon Johnson went into politics because he had a vision for American domestic change. When he became president, he had his eyes on civil rights reform. He had his eyes on what he called the Great Society. Vietnam was something that he wanted to keep at bay. He couldn't afford to lose Vietnam because he knew that once he started losing Vietnam, he would lose Congress. Nor was he willing to go all out and say, put everything else aside, put the country on a war footing and say, this is what we need to do first. And he had two very good reasons for not doing that. One was a concern that the war in Vietnam would escalate to a war between the United States and the Soviet Union and or China. And at no point did anybody in the White House think that Vietnam was worth a war with the Soviet Union and China. And the other thing was, and this is sort of why the war in Vietnam from the American perspective ultimately turned out the way it did, Johnson understood, Nixon understood, Gerald Ford understood that the American people were willing to devote only so much in the way of resources, energy and time to Vietnam. The basic problem was that it was very difficult to make a case that Vietnam was intrinsically important to American security. It had some importance, but the importance lay in its relation to American credibility. If the United States has said it's going to defend South Vietnam and choose us not to or fails to do that, well, what are the Germans going to think? What are America's other allies going to think? Allies that are more important to the United States. Now Johnson wasn't the one who had made those promises and those promises were made by Harry Truman and by Dwight Eisenhower and followed up by John Kennedy. He was the inheritor of those promises, but because the promises had been made, he didn't think he could simply ignore them. It would have been politically impossible for Johnson to say, you know, this is a bad place for America to be involved militarily. We're going to pull the troops home. He simply could not have done that politically. Do you all agree with that? Because I think that's one point to get to. One possibility just to say very early on we are going to pull out and we're going to let this remain a local issue, essentially, a civil war. That clearly is the way that President Johnson saw it and that is the way that most of those that he trusted the most in the Congress and around him in his cabinet felt in the early stages. I should emphasize, however, that as the situation escalated, as the casualties mounted, as the shouts of hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today? Could even be heard in the White House by Lucy, by Lender, those of us who were there. And I'll never forget driving out one evening with him as the protesters shouted, I mean, very loudly at the limousine again, hey, hey LBJ, how many kids did you kill today? He laid over and he said, I just wish that they knew that I want peace as much as they do too. He wanted peace as much as any of the protesters. And I mean that. This was not a man who was either a hawk or a dove. I mean, he was a person looking to do what was right and he continued to say it's not doing what's right, knowing what's right. And he was trying to navigate through these and using secret channels, one of which was the Philadelphia Channel where this relatively young professor from Harvard University made contact with a group of French in Paris to conduct back channel discussions with Hanoi. I mean, LBJ so wanted to get Ho Chi Minh in a room and negotiate with him the same way he had been able to negotiate with Everett Dirksen with Gerald Ford and with others to achieve a peace. I mean, he'd been accustomed to that hands-on up close, but there was not. And I think each year the will in America to stay the course continued to erode and the incredible will of the North Vietnamese despite the loss of perhaps two million people. There was an unshakable will. It appeared coming from Hanoi despite the bombings, despite the loss of life. And I just want to say that American troops never lost a battle. Not in Hue, not in Tet. I mean, and I want all of you veterans out there, this is not BS. Never did Americans' forces lose a battle in that war. There were setbacks and there were huge casualties. But to those of you who served and died and people like Chan Scruggs who served and were wounded, I mean, this nation owes you an incredible amount of debt. And as you visit Thailand and Laos and Singapore and other places today, there are many people that think that communism might very well have replaced the type of democracy that finally flourished. I guess we'll never know. Alex, you go ahead, please. Well, your comment a while ago was about the 64 period and Tonkin Gulf, which was August 4th of 64 when the two destroyers were presumably attacked. Flash cables coming in from the Maddox saying that they were under attack, torpedoes in the water. The Turner Joy in the Maddox. And that happened to be the last day that I was there. No longer Rosie O'Donnell, that was 59 to 60. I was then over there commanding all the low and medium level reconnaissance forces actually in Southeast Asia, including Laos, Thailand, we're supposed to be flying in Laos, but Thailand and Vietnam. And that is the day I left. That was my final day there, the 4th. I took off at 6 and flew back to Okinawa, which was my home base. So I had no idea of what a president's thinking might be at that time. But fast-forwarding to when I was there in Washington in 65 and 6 when I knew Tom and when the best and the brightest were, as I say, doing their damnedest, we had felt we had no choice. We increased the size of the forces so that by 68, just prior to Nixon taking office, there were 543,000 people there, Americans in Vietnam. And we were losing 300 soldiers a week. 300 a week. So that president, Nixon, and I've read some of the things that he wrote during the campaign, the thought processes he had during the campaign about Vietnam, he knew very well that that was going to be something huge that he was going to have to deal with during his presidency. Although I will say that he devoted the first couple of months to his presidency to visiting Europe, and he was sort of Europe-centric in his thinking, and only in March I think that he... Well, in March of 1690s when he started the secret, highly secret bombing of Cambodia, another country, and that was serious business. You had gone in covertly earlier, but not bombing. Well, okay, but the bombing also preceded when we put our people in a year later. I think it was April of 1970, then our forces went in there. And yes, people were quitting the staff on principle. And a number of people in the National Security Council staff quit. That was the forerunner and the reason for Kent State. Students all over were demonstrating. So Nixon quickly got into the Vietnam and Vietnam problems that went with it. And Kent State, of course, was huge because four students were killed, I believe, was four. And that was on May 4th of 1970. But the secret bombing started in 69 right after he took office. So, and we were... I used to say we were paranoid about communism ever really ever since the Cold War. We were sort of... Today we don't think of it very seriously at all. I don't at all. But we did then, based on the theory that international communism insists on communism being universal. Well, if it's universal, that is to say, then we are for the overthrow of your country. And that's the reason that we tried to avoid, if we can, these little countries slipping in and becoming communists. If your neighbor became communist, the thought was that all the more chance that Laos would then fall. While I'm saying that, I came across a letter. The most interesting thing I've ever seen, no, it was a speech that John Kennedy gave back when he was a senator long before he was president. It was in 56. I think June 1st of 56, he was giving a speech to the friends of Vietnam or something like that. The speech given by JFK to the American Confederation or Conference of the American Friends of Vietnam. And he was actually passionate about Vietnam and about President Zm. And we do forget that this guy, Zm, was a real soldier. He did a whole lot of good things before we came along and started working with him. No, I mean, he did. He's responsible. He was the first president of Vietnam. And he believed in peace. And he stood up to the communists right alone. He did. And he didn't want any monkey business on his staff, everything. And he was very open about that. And he was the first president dating from 1955 of the Republic of Vietnam. And Kennedy's speech talks about Vietnam being the cornerstone of democracy in Asia and Laos and Thailand and Cambodia and even Japan and the Philippines were really at risk if South Vietnam didn't hold fast. And I'd like to also say... And he was all for it. And President Nixon and President Johnson were very much together. And he was very much together. President Nixon and President Johnson were very much together during the campaign of 68, President Nixon's positions were far more aligned with President Johnson's than at times were the positions of Vice President Hubert Humphrey. And there are many examples of that and speeches that brought tension to put it mildly between the Humphrey staff and the LBJ staff. And then as President Nixon took office, he continued to confer with President Johnson. He had a jet star sent to Berkstrom every Friday with a packet of material from Dr. Kissinger and from General Hague briefing papers for President Johnson to read. The jet star would take them back the following Friday. Often though, President Johnson threw Alexander Hague, Alexander Butterfield, Henry Kissinger would stay in touch with President Johnson throughout his presidency just as President Johnson conferred secretly with General Eisenhower about the war on several occasions. There was a continuity and, you know, you can argue it one way or the other, but there was a continuity at that point in many ways about Vietnam. We certainly had not been willing to go with the Massey B-52, but those sanctuaries contained significant numbers of North Vietnamese and Vietcong who would basically go into Cambodia and Laos to refresh, rebuild and come back and really with reinforcements to attack Americans. The fact that those two countries proclaimed to be neutral, they were not neutral at all. They were basically providing shelter for it. It was a very tough decision to escalate, and I know that many of the veterans out here, I have talked with many of them, they should have gone absolutely to the mat, but the China issue and many others, you know, it's far more complicated. Let's talk a little bit about 1968, which was, I think, ultimately, a very dark, challenging year for the United States. We had assassinations at home. We had growing civil unrest. President Johnson gives the famous speech in March of 1968 saying with peace hanging in the balance every day, he didn't believe that he should spend an hour or a day of his time on politics and announced that he would not seek or would not accept the nomination for another term. So that conversation was wide in the open. And I wonder, you know, with President Johnson having won a landslide and a mandate in 1964, obviously what we saw in 1968 was whiskers in between President Nixon and Vice President Humphrey. Alex, I wondered if your sense, maybe even going back to what Bill had said, that there was a political impossibility to sort of pull out at that point. Tom, you're talking about the continuity between President Johnson and President Nixon. On Vietnam. Was there another way coming after that election, giving how divided the country was, giving how much loss of life had been sustained? Was there a different way to go? Or was he obliged to stay in the course? I don't think Nixon felt that way. He laid out very clearly during his campaign in 1968 for the presidency that he didn't want it to be... He did not want... He wanted an honorable piece. An honorable end. Yeah, an honorable piece. In other words, he faced up to the fact that we were going to have to deal with the Vietnamese and his idea then, he had it in 1968 and he did put it to the test and it did seem to work. His Vietnamization plan, which he was a little slow to announce it, but where we would, as I said, 543,000 people, we would gradually withdraw but only as our training of the Vietnamese people and supplying them with arms and munitions and maybe better weapons and that sort of thing so that they could gradually take over. And as they could do that, we'd pull out. And he did do that in June... I think June 8th of 1969, he pulled out 25,000, I guess was the initial thing. And then in September, 40,000. And then in December, another 45,000, I think. So he pulled out about 115,000 in that first year, 69. So presumably the Vietnamese were taking over more and more of the battle. But one thing that we haven't mentioned, everyone wonders why. The French lost at Dien Bien Phu in 54 because they were still trying to fight one of these set-piece battles or trench warfare or something in the jungle where the Vietnamese could put so many tons on an elephant's back and go through the jungle. In other words, the jungle was used to their advantage. You could fly over there and see elephants running through those areas, Cambodia and Laos from the air. And we continued to do, in that letter I mentioned of Kennedys, not the letter, the speech he gave in 56, praising the country and commending them and commending ZM. He likens the U.S. forces to a volunteer fire department where they come in and they put out the fire and then they get the hell out of there and go to the next fire and they leave the people who are now homeless or something to clean up the mess and rebuild and we go on to another conflagration. Alex, I think you and I are good enough friends that I can hit you with a hardball. All right. There was controversy about, clearly there was controversy about this one. In 68, we were working to get the parties to the conference table in Paris. Then for sort of unexplained reasons, the South Vietnamese pulled back and showed reluctance. Can you tell us today, and you were not there, you were not there in the campaign of 68, you came later into the White House. Tell us about the Chanel episode and what do you know about it? Historians are still trying to sort out. Oh, you mean about Anna Chanel? Yes, Anna Chanel. I don't know that story. I know Anna quite well, but I don't know what she was doing for Nixon. She was delivering a message for Nixon. Sure. What Tom is getting at is that being placed and having access to officials in South Vietnam, there is real question as to whether or not there was interference by the Nixon campaign in the peace process, essentially saying that if you back off of the table now, and Nixon is elected, that you will essentially get a better deal. There are a lot of stories to that effect. There was one of the historians' interview that was posted on the Nixon Presidential Library website. Do you have any insight into that? I know she ended up not speaking to Nixon. She's very upset with Richard Nixon. Anna. But I don't know. I don't know that story. Something very similar was alleged against the campaign of Ronald Reagan in 1980. And the story was that the message had gone from the Reagan campaign to Tehran, where Americans were being held hostage. If you keep the hostages until after the election, you'll get a better deal from the new administration. In the case of Reagan, it's quite unclear whether this had any authorization from Reagan. In the case of 1968, you didn't have to be a political genius if you were a leader of South Vietnam to think, you know, we're going to get a new president anyway. There's no point in going out on the limb for a president who's going to be leaving office. We're going to see what we get with the new president. So I don't know exactly what was said by Anna Chanel and the people around her, but I don't think it's actually that important because, you know, common sense would say, don't give any concessions because you're going to deal with the new president. There might be a new ballgame. I would add one thing about this transition from Johnson to Nixon. Nixon had an ace up his sleeve, or at least he thought he did, because Nixon was going to inaugurate the policy of detente which he was going to approach the Chinese and the Soviets separately and try to peel apart their alliance, which was already framed. The basic premise that Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower employed to justify American intervention in Vietnam to the extent that they intervened was that the Communist movement in the world was essentially this monolith and therefore the victory for any Communist party in any part of the world was an addition to the strength of the Soviet Union, which was always the great concern of the United States. By the late 1960s, Richard Nixon was the first as president to acknowledge this and try to exploit it. The Communist movement had fallen apart and there was absolutely no reason to think that a Communist victory in Vietnam would augment the strength of the Soviet Union. In fact, there was plenty of reason to think it might do just the opposite if the Vietnamese allied with the Chinese. I hope that he could split the major communist countries and get them to withdraw their support of North Vietnam because that's what kept the North Vietnamese army in the field. They were getting resupplied from the Soviet Union from China. If Nixon could talk Moscow and Beijing into withdrawing their support from North Vietnam, then the plan of Vietnamization, where American troops would pull out that American air support and military support would continue, then that was feasible. In fact, he never did get the Soviets and the Chinese to go along with it. And then the policy became infeasible. There's also one major elephant in this room, the role of the media. Early on, if you were to sample the American press, which I've tried to do, there was enormous support, enormous support. It looked as though most of the publishers in America were very pro, I would say pro-war, but really pro. And as many of the early correspondents were reporting a more favorable story about it, but thanks to some extraordinary reporters and photographers. Peter Arnett is in this room. He's an example of one of the extraordinary Pulitzer Prize-winning reporters for the Associated Press. The incredible photographers that were there both television photographers as well as Nick and all of those who are going to be heard from later today. Those images, the cover of Life Magazine, but then the impact of television. Dan Rather is going to be a part of this program, as you know. But as those images continued to come across on the TVs and in the newspapers of America, it had profound impact on the policy makers, profound impact on the people in the streets. And I'm glad that we have as much of the program that's to come that will look at the impact of the media because it was extraordinary. And that is a nice place to leave it. We could go on for another hour easily, but we are down to the end of our time. So thank you, gentlemen. I'd like to thank all of you for being here for this opening panel of the Vietnam War Summit. Certainly thanks to the LBJ Presidential Library. And if you wouldn't mind, please give a big hand to Mr. Alexander Butterfield, Mr. Tom Johnson, and to Mr. H.W. Will Brands. Gentlemen, thank you very much, and thank you for joining us. Thank you very much.