Arizona Daily Star  Date: Sat, 22 Mar 1997

Story of Vietnam: pointless
        dying demanded by
        American political passions

        Sometimes the most startling stories barely make it into the
        papers. Here's one that ran Feb. 15 on an inside page of The
        New York Times. It discloses that Lyndon Johnson, as early
        as 1964, viewed the Vietnam War as pointless. 

        The twist that makes this a tale for a great fiction writer is
        Johnson's belief that, pointless though it was, Congress
        would destroy him if he tried to pull out. So he didn't, and so
        the war destroyed him instead. And gave us all that death. 

        Here in a baffling tangle of political detail are the elements
of
        tragedy: the tale of a man destined to be destroyed, no
        matter the choice he makes. 

        The news story is based on two tapes of Johnson's 1964
        telephone conversations, released by the Johnson presidential
        library. In one he was talking to McGeorge Bundy, his
        national security adviser; in the other, with Senator Richard
        B. Russell, chairman of the Armed Services Committee and
        one of Johnson's closest friends. 

        ``The biggest damn mess I ever saw,'' Johnson says of the
        war on one tape. ``I don't think it's worth fighting for, and I
        don't think we can get out.'' 

        Thus Johnson in the spring of the 1964 election year. He
        won that election by a landslide while depicting the
        Republican Barry Goldwater as a war lover too dangerous to
        be trusted with control of the atomic bomb. 

        Talent for deception may have been Johnson's fatal hubris.
        As we know from the Pentagon Papers, the military buildup,
        which turned out to be the end of him, was being secretly
        planned even while Johnson was running as the peace
        candidate. 

        On one of the 1964 tapes he speaks of a sergeant, father of
        six, who ``works for me over there at the house,'' and tells
        Senator Russell, ``Thinking of sending that father of those
        six kids in there and what the hell we're going to get out of
        his doing it  it just makes the chills run up my back.'' 

        Russell, then one of the most powerful men in the Senate,
        replies: ``It does me, too. We're in the quicksands up to our
        neck, and I just don't know what the hell to do about it.'' 

        ``They'd impeach a president, though, that would run out,
        wouldn't they?'' Johnson said. 

        In 1964 he had good reasons to think so. These lay in the
        long, savage political wars of the 1950s. Starting with their
        investigations of Communist influences on the Roosevelt and
        Truman governments, Republicans found it politically
        rewarding to accuse Democrats of being ``soft on
        Communism.'' Richard Nixon was famous for his pioneering
        toil in this vein, and Democrats hated him for it forevermore.

        By the 1950s antiCommunism had become the glue binding
        an otherwise divided Republican Party in brotherhood. And,
        oh, how powerful were its juices! The Chinese Communist
        victory in Asia, happening during the Truman years,
        encouraged Republicans to ask, ``Who lost China?'' Only a
        dunce could doubt that the answer was: ``Those
        softonCommunism Democrats, they lost China.'' 

        At the same time  even more terrifying  the Soviets had our
        atom bomb. Had probably stolen the secret of how to make
        it. Maybe Democrats had made it easy for them, Democrats
        not being sufficiently worried about Communism to weed
        Red scientists out of our atombomb plants. 

        Soon more ruthless Republican campaigners were calling the
        Roosevelt and Truman years ``20 years of treason.'' Johnson
        had lived through all this and seen the party battered for not
        matching Republicans in antiCommunist zeal. 

        And what was the Vietnam War? An antiCommunist
        attempt to prevent global conquest by Marxism. In 1964
        Johnson had sound reason to suppose that pulling out of
        Vietnam just because it was pointless would have terrible
        consequences. 

        The antiCommunist passion of Americans was still too
        strong for any president to acknowledge that the Vietnam
        game was not worth the medal. After President Kennedy's
        death, colleagues said he would have pulled out if reelected
        in 1964. Maybe, maybe not. Who knows? What we do
        know now is that Johnson realized from the start that he was
        marching resolutely to nowhere. 

        Another decade of pointless dying ensued largely because
        longembedded American political passions demanded it. 

        Russell Baker is a columnist for The New York Times.