Pretty good. How are you, Mr. President?

Oh, I got lots of troubles. I want to see what you—

Well, we all have those.[note 1] The Presidential Recordings Program revised the following section of text in 2021 for inclusion in The LBJ Telephone Tapes, a project produced by the Miller Center in partnership with the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library to commemorate the library's 50th anniversary.

What do you think about this Vietnam thing? What—I’d like to hear you talk a little bit.

Frankly, Mr. President, if you were to tell me that I was authorized to settle it as I saw fit, I would respectfully decline to undertake it. [President Johnson chuckles.] It’s . . . it’s the damned worst mess I ever saw, and I don’t like to brag—I never have been right many times in my life—but I knew we were going to get in this sort of mess when we went in there. And I don’t see how we’re going [to] ever get out of it without fighting a major war with the Chinese and all of them down there in those rice paddies and jungles. I just don’t see it. It’s . . . I just don’t know what to do.

Well, that’s the way I’ve been feeling for—

It's deteriorating—

—six months.

Our situ[ation]—our position is deteriorating, and it looks like the more we try to do for them, the less they’re willing to do for themselves.[note 2] End of 2021 revisions. It’s just a sad situation. There’s no sense of responsibility there on the part of any of their leaders, apparently; it’s all just through generations, or even centuries, they have just thought about the individual and glorifying the individual, and that’s the only utilization of power . . . is just to glorify the individual and not to save the state or to help other people. And they just can’t shed themselves of that complex.[note 3] The Presidential Recordings Program revised the following section of text in 2021 for inclusion in The LBJ Telephone Tapes, a project produced by the Miller Center in partnership with the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library to commemorate the library's 50th anniversary. It’s a hell of a . . . hell of a situation. It’s a mess, and it’s going to get worse. I don’t know what to do. If . . . I don’t think the American people are quite ready for us to send our troops in there to do the fighting. And if it came down to an option of just sending the Americans in there to do the fighting, which will, of course, eventually lead into a ground war and a conventional war with China, and we’d do them a favor every time we’d kill a coolie, whereas [if] one of our people got killed, it’d be a loss to us—if it got down to that or just pulling out, I’d get out. But, then, I don’t know. There’s undoubtedly some middle ground somewhere. If I was going to get out, I’d get the same crowd that got rid of old [Ngô Đinh] Diệm to get rid of these people and get some fellow in there that said he wished to hell we would get out.[note 4] Before being overthrown and murdered in a November 1963 coup, Ngô Đinh Diệm had served as President of South Vietnam. And that’d give us a good excuse for getting out. I just . . . it’s . . . I see no terminal date or, boy oh boy, any part of that in there.

How important is it to us?

It isn’t important a damn bit.[note 5] End of 2021 revisions. But all this new missile [unclear].

Well, I guess it’s important to us, isn’t it, from—

Well, from a psychological standpoint.

I mean, yes, and from the standpoint that we are party to a treaty and if we don’t pay any attention to this treaty, why, I don’t guess they’ll think we’re paying attention to any of them.

Yeah, but we’re the only ones paying any attention to it.[note 6] Johnson and Russell were referring to the Manila Pact of 1954, which created the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO). Loosely modeled on NATO, SEATO provided for the mutual defense of non-Communist countries in the region.

Yeah, I think that’s right.

You see, the other people are just as much bound by that treaty as we are.

That’s right, that’s right, but just because somebody else—

I think there’s some 12 or 14 other countries that were party to it.

That’s right, there are, 14 of them, but–[note 7] Signatories to the Southeast Asia Treaty (SEATO) included the United States, France, Great Britain, the Philippines, Thailand, Pakistan, Australia, and New Zealand. Cambodia, Laos, and South Vietnam could not sign the treaty because of the nonalliance provisions of the 1954 Geneva Accords, while India, Burma, and Indonesia chose not to sign. Johnson’s total of 14 parties to the treaty, however, appears to count these latter two groups as de facto members of SEATO. Stanley I. Kutler, ed., Encyclopedia of the Vietnam War (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1996), pp. 499–500.

I’m not . . . I don’t know much about foreign policy, but it seems to me there was several of them that were—

Yeah, there [were] 14.

—were parties to it, and other than the question of our word and saving face, that’s the reason I said that I don’t think that anybody would expect us to stay in there. Some old freebooter down in there that—I’ve forgotten his name, I haven’t heard about him lately, but he’s still there, sort of a hell-raiser, and he don’t know exactly what he wants, I think . . . but he’s the most dangerous thing to the present regime. I think that if he were to take over, he’d ask us to get out, and of course if he did, under our theory of standing by the self-determination of people, I don’t see how we could say we’re not going to go, certainly, if he was in charge of the government. The thing is going to be a headache to anybody that tries to fool with it.

Now you’ve got all the brains in the country, Mr. President, you better get ahold of them. I don’t know what to do about this. I saw it all coming on, but that don’t do any good now; that’s water over the dam or under the bridge. And we’re there, and . . .

Well, you’ve got Bob [McNamara]—

That man you’ve got over there, McNamara, he was up here testifying yesterday before the committee—I didn’t want to have him up here, but Howard Cannon and some of them wanted to have him.[note 8] Senator Howard Cannon of Nevada served on the Senate Armed Services Committee that Russell chaired. On 26 May, McNamara testified before a closed session of the committee. James Cary, “U.S. Gives ’Blank Check’ in S. Viet-Nam,” Washington Post, 27 May 1964. So I sat up here at 8:30 before I started the appropriations hearings. He’s got . . . rather, he’s been kicked around on it so where I’m not sure he’s as objective as he ought to be in surveying the conditions out there. He feels like it’s sort of up to him personally to see that the thing goes through. And he’s a can-do fellow but I’m not too sure he understands the history and background of those people out there as fully as he should. But even from his picture, the damn thing ain’t getting any better and it’s getting worse. And we’re putting more and more in there, and they’re taking more and more away from the people we’re trying to help, that we give them. I don’t know, sir, you better get some brains from somewhere to apply to this thing, because I don’t know what to do with it.

Well, I spend all of my days with [Dean] Rusk and McNamara and [McGeorge] Bundy and [Averell] Harriman and [Cyrus] Vance, and all those folks that are dealing with it. And I would say that it pretty well adds up to them now that we’ve got to show some power and some force and that they do not believe—they’re kind of like [Douglas] MacArthur in Korea—they don’t believe that the Chinese Communists will come into this thing, but they don’t know, and nobody can really be sure, but their feeling is that they won’t and, in any event, that we haven’t got much choice; that we are t reaty-bound, that we are there, that this will be a domino that will kick off a whole list of others, and that we’ve just got to prepare for the worst. Now, I have avoided that for a few days, and I don’t think the American people are for it. I don’t agree with [Wayne] Morse and all he says, but it doesn’t look to me–[note 9] Johnson was referring to Oregon’s Democratic Senator Wayne Morse, an early and outspoken critic of U.S. involvement in Vietnam. John G. Norris, “Small Senate Band Wages Vocal Fight on Viet War Stepup,” New York Times, 22 May 1964; Logevall, Choosing War, pp. 136–37.

No, neither do I, but he’s voicing the sentiment of a hell of a lot of people.

I’m afraid that’s right. I’m afraid that’s right. I don’t think the people of the country know much about Vietnam and I think they care a hell of a lot less.

I know, but you go to sending a whole lot of our boys out there they’ll find out something [unclear].

Yeah, that’s right, that’s exactly right. That’s what I’m talking about. You get a few—we had 35 killed and we got enough hell over 35 this year. So . . .

That many . . . more than that have been killed in Atlanta, Georgia . . . been killed this year in automobile accidents over here.

That’s right, and 83 went down on one crash on a 707, but—one day—but that doesn’t make any difference.

That’s a hazard our folks understand. They don’t understand this one over there now.

The Republicans are going to make a political issue out of it, every one of them, even [Everett] Dirksen.

It’s the only issue they’ve got.

I talked to Dirksen the other day, Friday, and he suggested that I have three of Armed Services [Committee] and three from Appropriations [Committee] and three from Foreign—all of them from Foreign Relations [Committee] down, and I told him all right, and so I invited them. And yesterday before they came, he gave out a big statement that we had to get us a program and go after them.[note 10] For this incident, see George Reedy to Johnson, 10:40 a.m., May 27, 1964, in this chapter. And [Bourke] Hickenlooper said that [we] just had to stand and show our force and put our men in there and let come what may come, and nobody disagreed with him. Now [Mike] Mansfield, he just wants to pull up and get out, and Morse wants to get out, and [Ernest] Gruening wants to get out, and that’s about where it stops.[note 11] Along with Senator Morse, Senator Ernest Gruening of Alaska had been a vocal critic of U.S. intervention in Vietnam. Senator Majority Leader Mike Mansfield, the leading Senate expert on Asia, had endorsed serious consideration of French President Charles de Gaulle’s proposal for the neutralization of Vietnam in a Senate speech on 21 May. Mansfield also called for continued U.S. assistance to South Vietnam. Norris, “Small Senate Band Wages Vocal Fight.” Senator Bourke B. Hickenlooper was a Republican from Iowa. I don’t know.

And there’s others here that want to get out. They haven’t said much about it, but Frank Church has told me two or three times that he didn’t want to make a speech on it, but he just wishes to God that we could get out of there.[note 12] Senator Frank Church, an Idaho Democrat, had privately expressed such views throughout the first half of 1964. In midsummer he would make his concerns public in a speech on the Senate floor. Logevall, Choosing War, pp. 137, 168–70. I don’t know whether he told you that or not.

No, I haven’t talked to him, but . . .

But, I just used that as an illustration, because he mentioned that to me more than once, and—

Who are the best people that we have, that you know of, to talk to about this thing? I don’t want to do anything on the basis of just the information I’ve got now.

I don’t . . . I don’t know who, Mr. President.

I’ve talked to Eisenhower a little bit.

I think that the people that you have named have all formed a hard opinion on it. I think that if you could get somebody to make a survey—

Old Rusk is . . . Rusk has tried to pull back. He’s tried to hold back on everything. But he’s about to come to the conclusion now that Laos is crumbling and Vietnam is wobbly.

Oh, Laos, Laos, Laos, hell, it ain’t worth a damn. They’ve been talking about all these battles down there, and I tried to get the best information I could from CIA and from Defense both on all this fierce fighting on the Plain of Jars and all, and the highest estimate as to the casualties is 150. That Laotian thing is absolutely impossible. It’s a whole lot worse than Vietnam. There are some of these Vietnamese, after they beat them over the head, that will go in there and fight, but Laos is an impossible situation. That’s just a rat hole there. I don’t know if—before I took any drastic action, I think I’d get somebody about like old Omar Bradley and one or two perhaps senior people in who have had government experience, not necessarily the military. If he wasn’t scared to death of McNamara, this fellow Adams, who is the head of STRIKE, would be a topflight man to send out there with them.[note 13] General Omar N. Bradley commanded the Twelfth U.S. Army Group at the end of World War II. After the war, he served as the first head of the Veterans Administration and as the first chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff before retiring as a five-star general in 1953. In addition, Russell probably was referring to General Paul DeWitt Adams, who served as commander of the U.S. Strike Command (USSTRICOM/CINCSTRIKE). Under the Department of Defense’s Unified Command Plan, this command had responsibility for U.S. military action in geographic areas not assigned to other regional commands. It also provided support for the operations of the regional commands. Major Thomas P. Odom, Dragon Operations: Hostage Rescues in the Congo, 1964–1965, Leavenworth Papers, no. 14 (Fort Leavenworth, KS: Combat Studies Institute, U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, 1988), http://purl.access.gpo.gov/GPO/LPS58622. Let them go out there and fool around for a few days and smell the air and get the atmosphere and come back here and tell you what they think. Because they are new in it and would not have a great many preconceived ideas in approaching it.

Now one of our big problems there, Dick, the biggest, between us, and I don’t want this repeated to anybody—is [Henry Cabot] Lodge.

I know it.

He ain’t worth a damn. He can’t work with anybody—

Why, of course he won’t let [unclear], won’t let [unclear] go out there.

He won’t let anybody else work. Now we get the best USIA [United States Information Agency] man to put on all the radios and try to get them to be loyal to the government and to be fighting and quit deserting . . .

He thinks he’s emperor out there.

. . . and he just, he calls in the USIA and says, “I handle the newspapers and the magazines and radio myself, so to hell with you.” So that knocks that guy out.[note 14] This probably was a reference to Barry Zorthian, a U.S. Information Agency officer who since January 1964 had served as the public affairs officer for the U.S. embassy in Saigon. In early June, Zorthian was given increased authority over the coordination of U.S. “information-psychological” programs. He became notorious as the primary instigator of the “Five O’Clock Follies,” the relentlessly upbeat and often inaccurate daily press briefings delivered by embassy and military staff. “Memorandum from the Director of the United States Information Agency (Rowan) to the President,” 26 May 1964, U.S. Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS), 1964–1968: Vietnam 1964, ed. Edward C. Keefer and Charles S. Sampson (Washington, DC: GPO, 1992), 1:384; Kutler, ed., Encyclopedia of the Vietnam War, p. 195. Then we send out the best CIA man that we’ve got, and he said, “I handle the intelligence, to hell with you.” Then he wants a new deputy chief of mission. We get him to give us some names and we pick one of those—the best one we’ve got—send him out to run the damn war and he gets to where he won’t speak to the deputy chief of mission.[note 15] David G. Nes served as the deputy chief of mission at the U.S. embassy in Saigon until July 1964. He became deeply pessimistic about the prospect of reforming the South Vietnamese government. Logevall, Choosing War, pp. 112–14. Then we got General [Paul] Harkins out there—and we thought that he was a pretty good man—and then he gets to where he can’t work with him, so we send [William] Westmoreland out.[note 16] General Paul Harkins commanded the U.S. Military Assistance Command in Vietnam. By the spring of 1964, Harkins was widely seen as ineffective. In June he was replaced by General William Westmoreland. George C. Herring, America’s Longest War, p. 116. [with increasing tone of exasperation] And it’s just a hell of a mess. And you can’t do anything with Lodge and that’s where McNamara’s so frustrated. He goes out and they get agreements and he issues orders and he sends stuff in there and then Lodge just takes charge of it himself. And he’s not a take-charge man, and it just gets stacked up there.

He never has followed anything through to a conclusion since I’ve known him, and I’ve known him for 20-odd years. He never has. I went out with him around the world, in ’43, the only committee [that] went out during the war, and we went everywhere and Lodge was on there; and he’s a bright fellow, intelligent fellow, but he’s just not a man that persists, and he thinks he’s dealing with barbarian tribes out there and that he’s the emperor and he’s going to tell them what to do.[note 17] Henry Cabot Lodge, a Republican, had served in the U.S. Senate from 1937 to 1952. In 1943, as members of the Truman Committee, Lodge, Russell, and three other senators had toured all major combat theaters in order to investigate the performance of U.S. war agencies. For an account of their trip and particularly of Lodge’s summary report, see Arthur Krock, “War Tour by Senators Promises Wide Benefits,” New York Times, 3 October 1943. There ain’t any doubt in my mind but he had old Diem killed out there, himself, so he could—

That was a tragic mistake. It was awful–[note 18] As vice president, Johnson had opposed the November 1963 coup that overthrew Diem and culminated in his murder. Logevall, Choosing War, p. 76.

Oh, he—

And we’ve lost every—

He wanted to get somebody that was more pliant to Lodge who’d do exactly what he said, right quick. And he’s living up on cloud nine . . . it’s a bad mistake. I don’t know, I think probably the best thing you could do would be to ask Lodge if he don’t think it’s about time [that] he [is] coming home.[note 19] Lodge resigned as ambassador in June to work against Barry Goldwater’s nomination as the Republican candidate for President; he returned to the post the following year.

Well, he’d be back home campaigning against us on this issue every day.

Well, God Almighty, he’s going to come back anyhow when the time comes. I’d give him a reason for doing it. He’s going to come back. If you bring him back now, everybody will say, “Well, hell, he’s mad because Johnson removed him out there.” MacArthur couldn’t—even with all of his power—couldn’t hurt Truman because everybody would have said, “Well, hell, he’s just mad because he got removed,” though millions sympathized with him in it. And you needn’t to worry, Lodge will be in here. In my judgment, he’ll be on that ticket in some way. I don’t think they will nominate him for president, but they may put him on there for vice president. But whether they do or don’t, he’ll be back here campaigning before that campaign’s over. I don’t know, I’d better take that back. This thing is so hopeless for the Republicans, I just doubt that—he’s certainly got enough political sense to know that and not get his head chopped off. He’d look perfectly foolish.

Has [Lucius] Clay got any judgment on a thing like this?[note 20] Johnson was referring to General Lucius Clay, who had served as the military governor of Germany and commander of U.S. forces in Europe from 1945 to 1949 (during which he oversaw the Berlin Airlift) and as President Kennedy’s representative to Berlin (during the building of the Berlin Wall). Is the experience he—

Yes, he has. Yeah, he has. But, though, he’s inclined to . . .

He’s in other area[s] of the world, though, mostly, isn’t he?

I think Clay has . . . he knows . . . I’d take his judgment on most anything, if he’d separate himself from his predilections, and he don’t have any out in that part of the world. And I think people, generally, have got a good deal of respect for Clay’s judgment too, and there’s a great deal of affection and respect for old man Bradley. He’s not in his dotage yet by a hell of a lot. I had him up here the other day, getting some advice from him on some matters, and I found him very alert. He’s so humble; I don’t know, he’d just be a doormat for Lodge out there. But, he’s an intelligent man. Now Clay wouldn’t. Clay will—he’d stand up to anybody if he feels like he’s got any support from high-up places.[note 21] The Presidential Recordings Program revised the following section of text in 2021 for inclusion in The LBJ Telephone Tapes, a project produced by the Miller Center in partnership with the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library to commemorate the library's 50th anniversary. [Pause.] I just don’t know; it’s a tragic situation. It’s just one of those places where you can’t win. Anything you do is wrong.[note 22] End of 2021 revisions.

[Pauses.] Well, think about it and call me.

All right, sir. I will, but—

I just—

I have thought about it, I have worried about it, and I have prayed about it.

I don’t believe we can do anything—

[Unclear] religiously I have. It’s something that frightens me because it’s my country that is involved over there. And if we get into there on any considerable scale, there’s no doubt in my mind but that the Chinese will be in there. And then we’ll be fighting a dang conventional war against our secondary . . . not a potential threat. And it’ll be Korea on a much bigger scale and a worse scale because the peculiar physical configuration of Korea made extensive guerrilla fighting impossible. But that’s not true over in there. If you go from Laos and Cambodia and Vietnam and bring North Vietnam into it too, it’s the damnedest mess on earth. The French report that they lost 250,000 men and spent a couple of billion of their money and 2 billion of ours down there, and just got the hell whipped out of them. And they had the best troops they had, including practically a division of crack German troopers who were starving and enlisted in the Foreign Legion and went down there.

You don’t have any doubt but what if we go in there and get them up against the wall, the Chinese Communists are going to come in?

No, sir. No doubt about it at all.

That’s my judgment, and our people don’t think so.

There’s no doubt in my mind about it that you’ll find Chinese volunteers in there as soon as you get—very shortly after we have active combat units engaged.

Now, Mike writes me a memo and all he says is that [reading from Mansfield’s memo] “we continue to support the Vietnamese,” that’s number one, and “the end to the reflex of pique and face-saving at every essay of [Charles] de Gaulle’s” . . . well, we’re not piqued, we just asked de Gaulle to give us a blueprint, and he don’t have it, he just says “neutralization,” but there ain’t nobody wants to agree to neutralization. And we asked him who will agree to go with old Ben Milam.[note 23] A soldier and trader from Kentucky, Ben Milam was a leader of the Texas independence movement in the 1830s. In December 1835, when some leaders of the rebel Texas forces wanted to delay a planned attack on a Mexican army camped at San Antonio until after the winter, Milam disagreed. Instead he urged other members of the Texas volunteers to join him in a surprise attack: “Who will go with old Ben Milam into San Antonio?” The attack succeeded, but as Russell reminded Johnson later in the conversation, Milam was killed by a sniper’s bullet. “milam, benjamin rush,” The Handbook of Texas Online, www.tsha.utexas.edu/handbook/online/articles/view/MM/fmi3.html. We’re ready, but he just says, “Well, we have to continue to maintain our strength and get in a position.” But he’s got no blueprint. “Three: a realistic facing of the fact that we’re in this situation without reliable military allies.” Well, hell, I know that. “Four: an exploration of the possibilities of the United Nations or some other arrangement.” Well, we—

Whose—

This is Mike Mansfield, and they won’t do a damn thing. Even on the Cambodian border, we can’t get a majority vote in the Security Council. [reading, again from Mansfield’s memo] “A willingness to entertain any reasonable proposals for international conferences.” Well, we are ready to confer with anybody anytime, but that . . . conferences ain’t going to do a damn bit of good. They ain’t going to take back and give us the territory and behave. We tell them every week, we tell [Nikita] Khrushchev, we send China and Hanoi and all of them word that we’ll get out of there and stay out of there, if they’ll just quit raiding their neighbors. And they just say, “Screw you.”

That’s right.

So the conferences won’t do it. Now the whole question as I see it, do we—is it more dangerous for us to let things go as they are going now, deteriorating every day . . .

I don’t think we can let it go, Mr. President, indefinitely, like it—

. . . than it would be for us to move in.

We’ve either got to move in or move out . . . in the near future.

That’s about what it is.

You can make a tremendous case for moving out, but not for . . .

Well, now you take a Nixon—

. . . not as good a one for moving in.

Nixon, [Nelson] Rockefeller—

But it would be more consistent with the attitude of the American people and their general reactions to go in, because they could understand that. But getting out, even after we go in and get bogged down in there with the war with China will be—is going to be a hell of a mess; it’d be worse than we are now to some extent. And that’s what makes it so difficult. And don’t forget that old Ben Milam’s the only man that got killed. They said who’d go with old Ben, he’s a great hero, but he got killed.[note 24] With this reminder of Ben Milam’s personal fate, Russell implicitly chided Johnson for his earlier bravado in discussing Mansfield’s support of neutralization.

[Chuckles softly] That’s right.

And the old man was killed. And . . . so . . . if they start off with Ben Milam, which they ain’t going to do to any of the [unclear] degree, they’ll get out, and Ben [will] be killed. It’s just a hell of a come-on. I don’t know. I don’t know how much Russia . . . they want to cause us all the trouble they can, but if there’s any truth in the theory that they are really at odds with China. There really is a cleavage there.

They are, but they would go with them as soon as the fight started. They wouldn’t forsake that China, that Communist philosophy.

I didn’t . . . I wasn’t talking about the fighting, but what we might get them to take an active part in getting the thing straightened out. However—

We’re doing all we can on that, but she doesn’t show any signs of contributing.

Well, because they’d be foolish to, from one extent, because we just continued pouring money in there and get nothing back out of it. We don’t even get goodwill back out of that. I just don’t know, it’s a—and I don’t know where to go for advice. I just don’t know where to go for it. McNamara is the smartest fellow any of us know, but he’s got so damned . . . he is opinionated as hell and he’s made up his mind on this, and I don’t think that any amount of—

Well, now, I’ll tell you what he’s done, Dick. I think he’s a pretty flexible fellow. He’s gone out there and he’s got [Nguyen] Khanh to agree that we cannot launch a counteroffensive or a hit in the North until he gets more stabilized and better set in the South.[note 25] Nguyen Khanh became Prime Minister of South Vietnam in January 1964 after overthrowing the generals who had staged the coup against Diem. And he thought he was buying us time and we could get by until November, but these politicians got to raising hell, and Scripps Howard’s writing these stories, and all the senators and Nixon and Rockefeller and [Barry] Goldwater are all saying, “Let’s move, let’s go into the North.”

That was a devastating piece that [Jim] Lucas had . . .[note 26] Jim Lucas was a reporter for the Scripps Howard Newspaper Alliance. In an 11 May story, he claimed that two U.S. pilots had been killed as a result of mechanical failures on their T38 fighter jets. The article charged that the planes were obsolete and had not been properly maintained. Life and U.S. News & World Report soon printed letters that the pilot had written to his wife before his death in which he complained about inadequate support and low morale. “We Are Losing, Morale Is Bad . . . If They’d Give Us Good Planes,” U.S. News & World Report, 4 May 1964; “McNamara Faces Quiz on Obsolete Plane Use,” Washington Post, 13 May 1964; “Sylvester Scores Magazine on Vietnam Letters,” New York Times, 23 May 1964.

Yes.

. . . on the front page of this little old paper.

That’s right.

That paper don’t cover much of the country, but if that got out everywhere, it would—that would raise a lot of hell.

That’s right. And they can always get an isolated example of bad things McNamara says, but that’s not generally true, that they have had too many damn people being killed, every day. And that they are flying the sorties and they are getting some results and they’re killing thousands of their people, but we’re losing more—I mean, we’re losing ground. And he was hoping that we could avoid moving into the North—and thereby provoking the Chinese—for a few months.

Well, there ain’t any way that you can move into the North. You know as well as I do we’ve tried that and—well, from [an] infiltration, guerrilla war standpoint—with disastrous results.

Lodge, Nixon, Rockefeller, Goldwater all say move. Eisenhower—

Well, you’re going to go ahead and bomb the North and kill a whole bunch of women and children and that would infuriate everybody and we’d be in a [unclear].

No, no. They say pick out an oil plant or pick out a refinery, or something like that. Take selected targets, watch these trails they’re coming down and try to bomb them out of them when they’re coming in.[note 27] On 24 May, Johnson had received a 12-page memorandum that detailed options for a bombing campaign against North Vietnam that would be conducted in conjunction with political efforts to induce the North to end its support for Vietcong attacks against South Vietnam. The military component, to which the President was apparently referring in this passage, recommended a gradual increase in pressure: “Initially, mine their ports and strike North Vietnam’s transport and related ability (bridges, trains) to move south; then against targets which have maximum psychological effect on the North’s willingness to stop insurgency. These latter targets would comprise those related to North Vietnam’s military power (e.g., POL storage, selected airfields, barracks/training areas, bridges, railroad yards, port facilities, communications) and those comprising their industrial assets. Initially, the strikes would be by South Vietnamese aircraft; they could then be expanded by adding FARMGATE, or U.S. aircraft, or any combination of the three.” The memo makes no specific mention of bombing raids on the Ho Chi Minh trail. “Memorandum for the President, Subject: Scenario for Strikes on North Vietnam,” 24 May 1964, “Folder 2: Vietnam Memos Vol. X: May 24–30/64,” Country File: Vietnam, Box 5, National Security File, Lyndon B. Johnson Library, pp. 3–4.

Ah, hell. That ain’t worth a hoot. You can’t . . . that’s just impossible, in fact, [unclear].

McNamara said yesterday that they—in Korea—that they–[Air Force Chief of Staff Curtis] LeMay and all of them—was going to stop all those tanks. There was 90 came through and they turned all the Air Force loose on them, and they got one; 89 come on through.

We tried it in Korea.

That’s what he said.

We even got out a lot of old B-29s to increase the bombing load and sent them over there and just dropped millions and millions of pounds of bombs, day and night. And in the morning—we’d knock out the road at night—and in the morning the damn people would be back driving over it. That’s true on that railroad over there on the North coast. We used the Navy and these 14-inch rifles and knocked the whole mountain down on it, shelled it. And knocked all the whole mountain down and covered up the railroad tracks, and everybody said, “By God, we’ve got them now.” And the next morning their trains are running like the devil right over that track. We just shot up several million dollars worth of shells to think that we’d closed it. We never could actually interdict all their lines of communications in Korea, though we had absolute control of the seas and the air. And we never did stop them. And you ain’t going to stop these people either.[note 28] The Presidential Recordings Program revised the following section of text in 2021 for inclusion in The LBJ Telephone Tapes, a project produced by the Miller Center in partnership with the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library to commemorate the library's 50th anniversary.

Well, they’d impeach a President, though, that'd run out, wouldn’t they?

No, sir, I don’t think they would.

[speaking over Russell] I just don’t believe—outside of [Wayne L.] Morse, everybody I talk to says you got to go in, including [Bourke B.] Hickenlooper, including all the Republicans. None of them disagreed with him yesterday when he made the statement that we had to stand. And I don’t know how in the hell you’re going to get out, unless they tell you to get out.[note 29] End of 2021 revisions.

If we had a man running the government over there that told us to get out, we could sure have a way [unclear].

Oh, yeah. That’s right. But you can’t do that.

And I don’t know if we could get somebody else. I can’t remember that fellow’s name, some sort of a maverick fellow that’s got a big following down in there below Saigon, and our people all hate him, because he’s always against the government, and he’s not fighting them and all, but he’s a very powerful man in Vietnam. And now, everybody that takes over the government gives him his excuse for their repressions and suppressions. And if he were to get it and say, “Now, you damn Yankees get out of here, I’m running this government now.”[note 30] The Presidential Recordings Program revised the following section of text in 2021 for inclusion in The LBJ Telephone Tapes, a project produced by the Miller Center in partnership with the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library to commemorate the library's 50th anniversary.

Wouldn’t that pretty well fix us in the eyes of the world, though, and it'd make us look mighty bad? [Sighs.]

Well, I don’t know. [chuckling] We don’t look too good right now. And, of course, you’d look pretty good, I guess, going in there with all the troops, and sending them all in there, but I’ll tell you, it’ll be the most expensive venture this country ever went into [unclear]—

I’ve got a little old sergeant [Kenneth “Ken” Gaddis] over that works for me over at the [White] House, and he’s got six children. And I just put him up as the United States Army and Air Force and Navy every time I think about making this decision and think about sending that father of those six kids in there.[note 31] Johnson was probably referring to Air Force Sergeant M. Kenneth Gaddis, a member of the White House staff. And what the hell are we going to get out of his doing it? And it just makes the chills run up my back.

It does me. I just can’t see it.

I just haven’t got the nerve to do it, and I don’t see any other way out of it.

You’ve got too much sense to do it.[note 32] End of 2021 revisions. That’s what—It’s one of these things where “heads I win, tails you lose.”

Well, think about it, and I’ll talk to you again. I hate to bother you, but I’m just—

I wish I could help you. God knows I do, because it’s a terrific quandary that we’re in over there—we’re just in the quicksands up to our very necks. And I just don’t know how—what the hell is the best way to do about it.

I love you and I’ll be calling you.

I’ll see you soon.