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

What harvest do we reap from this gallant sacrifice? An erosion of the moral leadership, a demeaning entanglement with a corrupt political clique in Saigon, disillusionment, despair here at home, and a disastrous postponement of imperative programs to improve our social ills.

The American people, in my opinion, and overwhelmingly in that regard, think that we made a mistake. And yet, read the proposed platform. We’re called upon not only to approve the disastrous policy, but even applaud it. I wonder if the American people are applauding it—they want to change it.

His state’s representatives at the convention, however, did not agree. The Nashville Tennessean reported that while he received “rousing cheers from other delegations, his own was silent during this appearance on the platform.” In fact, they voted against Gore’s proposal, forty-nine to two. 49Since the senator would not face reelection until 1970, he may have figured that he could recover whatever ground he might lose by his participation. He never did.

With the election of the new Republican president in November 1968, the United States had thoroughly rejected Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam policies. The attitudes of southerners who voted to repudiate Johnson had been greatly influenced by the hawks. Despite the efforts of Fulbright and Gore in particular, southerners still supported the move for a military victory, as evidenced by their enthusiastic support of George Wallace for president. Southern hawks, on the other hand, by their refusal to actively support Humphrey, enabled Nixon’s victory.

Johnson’s rejection also had much to do with the “middle course” he steered in Vietnam between hawks and doves. He stood more with the former, wanting to escalate the war enough so that the North Vietnamese would surrender. He was more influenced by his old friend Richard Russell, and his former colleagues John Stennis and Mendel Rivers, as evidenced by his approval of additional bombing targets as the air war hearings began. Though he viewed his “former friend” William Fulbright’s dissent as more a nuisance than a threat, he could not ignore the mounting criticism and “responsible” protests which the Vietnam hearings had, in part, inspired. The strength of the antiwar movement, as evidenced by the early success of dovish candidate Eugene McCarthy, played a part in Johnson’s decisions to refuse renomination and to halt the bombing of North Vietnam. As he left office, the proud but broken Texas politician still harbored resentment for the Arkansas senator. They never reconciled.

The debates that raged within Congress did not fully change Johnson’s mind, but they did add to his difficulties in prosecuting the war. The president left office, in one sense, a casualty of the war his administration escalated beyond anyone’s anticipations. The year 1968 became his administration’s breaking point, and southern members of Congress, though not the first to publicly break with Johnson’s Vietnam policies, lent credence, weight, and influence to the many voices of dissent. Johnson’s preoccupation with Vietnam and its dissenters possibly could have limited his attention to the August 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. That invasion came during a Democratic Convention that showed the political leaders of Johnson’s region, Johnson’s party, and the United States in general at one of its most divided and preoccupied periods in history.

1. “LBJ Goes to War (1964–1965),” Vietnam: A Television History , 1983, American Experience Series, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/vietnam/104ts.html(accessed 14 June 2008).

2. Joseph Herring, America’s Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950–1975 , 4th ed. (Boston: McGraw Hill, 2002), 243.

3. Several sources describe both Johnson’s strategy as “improvised” and provide reasons for the stated reasons for his gradual escalation. See Herring, America’s Longest War; James Olson and Randy Roberts, Where the Domino Fell: America and Vietnam, 1945–1990 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1991); William Conrad Gibbons, The U.S. Government and the Vietnam War: Executive and Legislative Roles and Relationships, Part IV: July 1965–January 1968 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995); and many others.

4. Herring, America’s Longest War , 252–59.

5. Herring, America’s Longest War , 262–68. See also Olson and Roberts, Where the Domino Fell , 199–206.

6. “Southern Militarism,” Southern Exposure 1 (Spring 1973): 60–62. Bruce J. Schulman, From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt : Federal Policy, Economic Development, and the Transformation of the South, 1938–1980 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 146.

7. Joseph Fry, Dixie Looks Abroad: The South and U.S. Foreign Relations, 1789–1973 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2002), 285.

8. Mark D. Carson, “F. Edward Hebert and the Congressional Investigation of the My Lai Massacre” (master’s thesis, University of New Orleans, 1993), 6.

9. Michael Beschloss, ed., Taking Charge: The Johnson White House Tapes, 1963–1964 (New York: Touchstone, 1997), 363.

10. Face the Nation, Transcripts of Television program, Columbia Broadcasting System, 1 August 1965, Richard Russell Senatorial Papers, hereafter referred to as Russell Collection, Richard B. Russell Library, Series, Athens, GA, IIIZ, Box 84.

11. Robert Mann, A Grand Delusion: America’s Descent into Vietnam (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 480.

12. Congress, Senate, Committee on Foreign Relations (hereafter referred to as SFRC), vol. 17, The Situation in Vietnam , 89th Cong., 1st Sess., 2 April 1965, 366–67, 393–403.

13. SFRC, vol. 16, The Situation in South Vietnam , 88th Cong., 2nd Sess., 3 December 1964, 369–70.

14. Congressional Record (hereafter referred to as CR), 89th Cong., 1st Sess., 15 June 1965, 13656–58.

15. SFRC, Senate, Foreign Supplemental Foreign Assistance Fiscal Year 1966—Vietnam , 89th Congress, 2nd Sess., 28 January 1966, 9, 14–15.

16. SFRC, Senate, Foreign Supplemental Foreign Assistance Fiscal Year 1966—Vietnam , 90th Congress, 2nd Sess., 17 February 1968, 454–55, 496–98, 545.

17. SFRC, Senate, Foreign Supplemental Foreign Assistance Fiscal Year 1966—Vietnam , 90th Congress, 2nd Sess., 462–66.

18. SFRC, Senate, Foreign Supplemental Foreign Assistance Fiscal Year 1966—Vietnam , 90th Congress, 2nd Sess., 498–99, 544–45.

19. Mann, Grand Delusion , 497.

20. Mann, Grand Delusion , 496.

21. William J. Fulbright, The Arrogance of Power (New York: Vintage, 1966), 15, 18, 106–8.

22. David M. Barrett, ed., Lyndon B. Johnson’s Vietnam Papers: A Documentary Collection (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1997), 451–53.

23. CR, 90th Cong., 1st Sess., 28 February 1967, 4715–16, 4718. See also Gibbons, The U.S. Government and the Vietnam War, Part III , 585–602.

24. “Pepper Stands Up—Any One Else Care to Be Counted?” Miami News , 9 August 1967, 16A.

25. CR, 90th Cong., 1st Sess., 27 July 1967, 20379–81.

26. William Greider, “Morton Modifies Vietnam War Views: ‘I Was Wrong,’” Courier-Journal & Times Bureaucrat , 8 August 1967, John Sherman Cooper Collection (hereafter referred to as Cooper Collection), The Wendell H. Ford Research Center and Public Policy Archives, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY, Box 548. See also “Address of Senator Thruston B. Morton, R.-KY before the National Committee of Business Executives for Peace in Vietnam,” Cooper Collection, Box 569