A war with two opposing critics
By 1967 the argument over Vietnam in the United States was no longer simply “for” or “against”. The best-known divide was between hawks and doves, but the two camps were not mirror images. Hawks generally wanted a harder and faster military effort. Doves wanted to scale back, stop the bombing or negotiate a way out. Many members of Congress fitted neither label neatly, and both camps spent much of the year criticising the way the war was being run, though for opposite reasons.
President Lyndon Johnson sat between them. He rejected both a large expansion of the war and a withdrawal, and he was attacked from both sides. Much of the political drama of 1967 comes from that squeeze.
The hawks in the Senate
Some of the most influential hawks were senior Southern Democrats who chaired powerful committees. Senator Richard Russell led the Armed Services Committee, and Senator John Stennis led its Preparedness Investigating Subcommittee. Their view, broadly, was that the civilian leadership in the Pentagon and White House was restraining the military from winning. Limits on which targets in North Vietnam could be bombed were a particular grievance, and they drew on the frustration of senior officers who felt the same way.
That frustration surfaced in August 1967, when the Stennis subcommittee held hearings on the air war. Senior military officers testified that the restrictions on bombing were costing American lives and reducing the effect of the campaign. The Defense Secretary then testified in a very different spirit. Robert McNamara argued that even much heavier bombing was unlikely to break Hanoi’s will or stop supplies reaching the south. The exchange exposed the gap between the Pentagon’s civilian leadership and the military chiefs. The subcommittee’s report afterwards sided with the commanders and urged a tougher air campaign, and Johnson was reportedly more willing to approve additional targets in the weeks that followed. The details of that campaign belong to the history of Rolling Thunder; the political point is that the hearings made the disagreement public.
The doves and Senator Fulbright
The best-known dove in the Senate was J. William Fulbright of Arkansas, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee. Fulbright had voted for the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in August 1964 and came to regret it. He held televised hearings on the war in early 1966 and published a book on American power the same year, and by 1967 he was the most prominent establishment critic of the administration. His complaint was less about tactics than about purpose: that the country was drifting into an open-ended commitment without a clear national interest at stake.
Other senators, including Wayne Morse, George McGovern and Frank Church, also questioned the war, and some Republicans pressed for a change of course. These critics were a minority, and most of Congress continued to vote for war funding. Voting for money for troops in the field was not the same as agreeing with the strategy, and many members did the former while quietly doubting the latter. Congress was also being asked to fund domestic spending at the same time, and the cost of the war began to complicate the Great Society programmes.
Public opinion shifts
Outside Washington, support eroded slowly. The big antiwar demonstrations and the growing antiwar protests of the year drew attention, but polling suggested that discontent came from many directions, including people who wanted a more forceful approach. Public opinion polls in the autumn of 1967 reportedly showed, for the first time, that more Americans thought sending troops had been a mistake than thought it had not, though the margin was narrow and the exact figures differed by pollster. Johnson’s approval ratings were poor by the end of the year, and the Vietnam troop levels then approaching half a million added to the sense that the war had no end in sight.
Within the Democratic Party, discontent was beginning to harden into organised opposition. The effort sometimes called the Dump Johnson movement was starting in the autumn, and it would help bring Eugene McCarthy into the primaries. That part of the story belongs mainly to 1968.
Johnson’s San Antonio formula
Johnson tried to answer both camps in a speech in San Antonio, Texas, on 29 September 1967. He said the United States would stop the bombing of North Vietnam if this would lead promptly to productive discussions, and if Hanoi did not take military advantage of the halt. The offer became known as the San Antonio formula.
It was meant to show that Washington was willing to talk without appearing to surrender. Doves welcomed the signal, though some thought the conditions too demanding. Hawks accepted it because it kept pressure on Hanoi. North Vietnam did not accept the terms, and it rejected the idea that talks could be linked to a promise not to exploit a bombing pause. The formula nevertheless remained part of the diplomatic record and was referred to again in the months that followed.
What the divisions meant
The divisions of 1967 were not simply left against right. Some of the sharpest conflicts were inside the government, between the White House, the Pentagon’s civilian leadership and the uniformed military. That helps explain why the shock of the Tet Offensive in early 1968 was so large: many people on every side had been told that the war was going well, or that it was being held back from going well. When that picture broke, positions that had been hardening all year changed quickly. In March 1968 Johnson announced he would not seek re-election, an outcome few would have predicted at the start of the previous year.