Günter Bischof - The Prague Spring and the Warsaw Pact Invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968

Johnson also responded to the hearings and attempted to steal the thunder of Fulbright by hastily arranging a meeting with the South Vietnamese leadership at a conference in Honolulu. On a few occasions, the networks preempted television coverage of the Vietnam hearings to carry statements from Johnson and South Vietnamese leaders Nguyen Cao Ky and Nguyen Van Thieu. The president also instructed the FBI to monitor all future Foreign Relations Committee hearings to determine if Fulbright, Gore, and other doves were receiving information from Communist sources. He also ordered the Bureau to monitor activities of committee members and record if they made any contacts with foreign, particularly Communist, government officials. In a meeting with Assistant FBI Director Cartha DeLoach, the president belittled Fulbright, his former friend and colleague, saying that he did not “know what the smell of a cartridge is,” and that the senator was a “narrow minded egotist trying to run the country.” 20

Fulbright followed up these hearings with several lectures and a book entitled The Arrogance of Power , in which he argued that U.S. arrogance led the country’s leaders to believe that its military could “go into a small underdeveloped nation and create stability where there is chaos, the will to fight where there is defeatism, democracy where there is no tradition of it, and honest government where corruption is a way of life.” Calling upon the region of his birth, Fulbright suggested that the Vietnam War, contrary to the administration’s claims, was not unlike the American Civil War. What were the North Vietnamese doing, he wrote, “that is different from what the American North did to the American South a hundred years ago, with results few of my fellow southerners now regret?” 21

As Johnson continually increased the troop levels and bombing targets, Fulbright, now completely estranged from the administration, did not hold anything back when consulting with the president. In a 25 July 1967 meeting between Johnson and the Senate committee chairs, the president outlined several of the difficulties he faced both on foreign and domestic matters. Fulbright responded bluntly, “Mr. President, what you really need to do is stop the war. That would solve all your problems.” Labeling the war as a “hopeless adventure,” Fulbright contended that Vietnam was “ruining our domestic and foreign policy.” After previously supporting foreign aid measures that facilitated U.S. involvement in Indochina, the foreign relations chairman, a sworn internationalist since the 1940s, insisted he might vote against the legislation “and may try to bottle the whole bill up in committee.”

Johnson remained calm and said that if Congress “wanted to tell the rest of the world to go to hell,” they could do it. Fulbright stood his ground, “My position is that Vietnam is central to the whole problem. We need a new look. The effects of Vietnam are hurting the budget and foreign relations generally.” “Bill,” Johnson replied testily, “everybody doesn’t have a blind spot like you do. You say don’t bomb North Vietnam on just about everything. We haven’t delivered Ho yet.” Johnson concluded, as he always did when challenged by members of Congress on Vietnam, that Fulbright at any time could introduce a resolution to repeal the Gulf of Tonkin resolution. Johnson, knowing Fulbright had never forgiven himself for acting as floor leader for the resolution, baited him further: “[Y]ou can tell the troops to come home. You can tell General Westmoreland that he doesn’t know what he’s doing.” 22Fulbright, saddened by the exchange, remained silent. Everyone in the room knew full well that his silence did not mean consent.

The chairman continually fought from 1966 to 1968 for some sort of congressional effort to slow down the pace of escalation. Of major concern to Fulbright and other Southerners, both doves and hawks, was the seeming irrelevance of the legislative branch in determining the course of the war. In late February 1967, the senator supported a nonbinding “sense of the Congress” resolution introduced by Senator Clifford Case of New Jersey that proposed limiting troop levels to 500,000 and stopping the air war unless there was a declaration of war. Fulbright used the measure as another opportunity to debate the war in the Senate, this time with his southern colleague Richard Russell. Though Russell disagreed with Fulbright on Vietnam policy, he did agree that the exercise on executive power in Vietnam, along with the growth of executive power elsewhere alarmed him enough to want to have a “review” in order to “take this country back to the proper separations of powers and the proper weighing of our system of checks and balances.” The resolution was later watered down considerably, and despite Russell’s eventual opposition, it passed. Though nonbinding, it was the first time the Senate had officially acted to provide a general framework for ending the war and bringing U.S. troops home. It would act as a precedent for later actions. 23

Fulbright’s and Gore’s dissent, along with the lack of a coherent military policy in Vietnam, also led to other southern defectors in 1967. In the summer of that year, Congressman Claude Pepper of Florida, a former senator and member of the Foreign Relations Committee in the 1940s, and a former law professor of Senator Fulbright’s at the University of Arkansas, withdrew his support for Johnson’s Vietnam policy because of the lack of a foreseeable end to the conflict, a refusal of the United States’ major allies to help shoulder the burden of war, and the apparent unwillingness of the South Vietnamese army to fight. 24On 27 July 1967, Republican Senator John Sherman Cooper of Kentucky, the soft spoken, well-respected former U.S. ambassador to India and newest member of the Foreign Relations Committee, advocated publicly the unconditional cessation of bombing in North Vietnam as an incentive to convene a peace conference. 25

Thruston Morton, the other Kentucky senator, had a much more dramatic change of heart on Vietnam. Morton, a former assistant secretary of state for Congressional Affairs and a former Republican Party national chairman, turned, almost immediately, from a hawk into a dove. As late as June 1967, the junior senator from Kentucky scolded the Johnson administration for not instituting a naval blockade of the port of Haiphong. By August, Morton publicly turned against the war in a speech to the National Committee for Business Executives for Peace in Vietnam. Over the past three years, he began, the United States had “witnessed a disastrous decline in the effectiveness of our foreign policy.” The root cause, he asserted, was “the bankruptcy of our policy in Vietnam.” In 1965, Morton continued, he supported President Johnson’s escalation of the war. The senator paused and added, “I was wrong.” Suggesting that the president had been “brainwashed” by the military industrial complex, Morton proposed several options including the cessation of all U.S. bombing of North Vietnam, the end to “search and destroy” missions conducted in South Vietnam by U.S. soldiers, the concentration of U.S. soldiers in coastal and populations centers of South Vietnam, the heightening of pressure on the Saigon government to enter into negotiations and institute internal reforms, the implementation of an internal and regional settlement probably decided by an all-Asian peace conference, and a communication to Hanoi that the United States’ “honorable disengagement” deserved an appropriate response. Morton’s abandonment of U.S. military action could not have been more complete or stunning in its scope. As one reporter observed, Morton had moved from “the sword to the olive branch.” 26Fulbright, therefore, had some new southern allies in the fight to bring the war to a close.