The evening of March 31
On Sunday evening, March 31, 1968, Lyndon Johnson spoke to the nation from the Oval Office. Most viewers expected a speech about Vietnam, and that is what the first part was. Johnson announced that he was ordering a reduction in the bombing of North Vietnam, limiting attacks to the area south of the 20th parallel, and that he was ready to begin peace talks. Then, at the end, he said something that surprised almost everyone, including some of his own staff.
He told the audience that he would devote his time to the duties of the presidency and said, “I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your President.” The statement ended a political career in which he had been in elected office, in one form or another, since 1937. The speech had been prepared with the ending included, though aides disagreed about whether he would actually deliver it, and it appears the final lines were added late in the process.
A war that was supposed to be going well
To understand the speech, one has to go back several months. Through 1967 the administration insisted that the war was moving in the right direction. In November, General Westmoreland told audiences in Washington that the end was coming into view. The number of American troops in Vietnam was close to half a million, and the debate over Vietnam troop levels and strategy had not been resolved.
Then, on January 30, 1968, communist forces launched the Tet Offensive, attacking cities and military bases across South Vietnam, even reaching the grounds of the American embassy in Saigon. In purely military terms, American and South Vietnamese forces eventually repelled the attacks, and the communist side suffered heavy losses. But the scale of the assault contradicted the public claims of progress, and the effect on American opinion was severe. Around the same time, the siege of Khe Sanh gripped attention in the news.
The pressures of February and March
Several developments followed one another.
- General Westmoreland’s headquarters, reportedly with the support of the Joint Chiefs, asked for a very large increase in troops, a figure usually given as about 206,000 more. The request became public in newspaper reports in March and added to the sense of crisis.
- Robert McNamara, who had been skeptical in private, left the Pentagon at the end of February, and Clark Clifford took over as secretary of defense on March 1. Clifford, a long-time friend of Johnson and a supporter of the war, conducted a review of policy and came to doubt that more troops were the answer.
- On February 27 the CBS anchor Walter Cronkite broadcast a report after visiting Vietnam, concluding that the war appeared to be a stalemate. Johnson is often said to have remarked that if he had lost Cronkite he had lost middle America. The story is well known, but the exact words are reported second-hand, and historians treat it with some caution.
- On March 12, Eugene McCarthy’s strong showing in New Hampshire showed political weakness, and Robert Kennedy entered the race four days later.
Advisers and the decision
In the final week of March Johnson convened a group of senior outside advisers, sometimes called the “Wise Men”, including former officials and diplomats. Several, who had earlier supported the war, now told him that the United States should look for a way to negotiate rather than escalate. The meeting is generally described as an influential moment, although how much it changed his mind is debated. Johnson decided against sending the full number of troops requested, authorised a smaller increase, and chose to pair a partial bombing halt with an offer of talks.
Why he chose to withdraw is harder to establish. His health and his wife’s wish for him to retire have been cited by historians. So has the likelihood of a damaging fight in the Wisconsin primary, scheduled for April 2. Johnson himself later said that he wanted to show he was not putting personal ambition ahead of the effort to find peace. Probably several reasons worked together, and it is not possible to say with certainty which one decided him.
Aftermath
North Vietnam responded to the speech by agreeing to preliminary talks, and negotiations began in Paris in May, though they made slow progress for years. Only days after the speech, on April 4, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, and riots followed in many cities. In April Hubert Humphrey, the vice president, announced his candidacy for the Democratic nomination. In June Robert Kennedy was shot after winning the California primary and died the next day. By August the Democratic convention in Chicago nominated Humphrey, who lost the November election narrowly to Richard Nixon.
Johnson left office in January 1969 and died in 1973. The March 1968 speech remains one of the few occasions on which an American president chose to end a re-election bid in the midst of a campaign. It was also an admission, though not stated in so many words, that the policy of gradual escalation had reached its political limit.