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

27. Gibbons, The U.S. Government and the Vietnam War, Part III , 808–11.

28. SFRC, U.S. Commitments to Foreign Powers, 90th Congress, 1st Sess., 16, 17, 21, 23 August and 19 September 1967, 79–81, 89–90.

29. SFRC, U.S. Commitments to Foreign Powers, 90th Congress, 1st Sess., 16, 17, 21, 23 August and 19 September 1967, 189–95, 197–99, 205.

30. Fry, Dixie Looks Ahead , 269, 279.

31. SFRC, Supplemental Foreign Assistance Fiscal Year 1966—Vietnam , 598.

32. Will Huntley, “Mighty Rivers of Charleston” (Ph.D. diss., University of South Carolina, 1993), 264.

33. William Peart, “Stennis Says Army Doesn’t Have ‘Green Light’ to Win,” Jackson Daily News (Jackson, MS), John Stennis Collection, Mitchell Memorial Library, Mississippi State University, Starkville, MS, vertical file, Stennis Collection. See also “Senator Russell on Vietnam: Go in and Win or Get Out,” U.S News and World Report , 2 May 1966, pp. 56–57.

34. Michael Scott Downs, “A Matter of Conscience: John C. Stennis and the Vietnam War” (Ph.D. diss., University of Mississippi, 1989), 87.

35. Senate, Armed Services Committee (hereafter referred to as ASC), Preparedness Investigating Subcommittee, Air War against North Vietnam, Part 1 , 90th Congress, 1st Sess., 23 August 1967, 57–65.

36. Senate, Armed Services Committee, Preparedness Investigating Subcommittee, Air War against North Vietnam, Part 4 , 90th Congress, 1st Sess., 25 August 1967, 294–97.

37. Downs, Matter of Conscience , 93.

38. Mann, Grand Delusion , 570–75.

39. Speech before Marian, VA, Chamber of Commerce, 8 February 1968, Harry Byrd Jr. Papers (hereafter cited as Byrd Jr. Papers), Special Collections, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, Box 55. See also “The Mood of Virginians,” transcript of senate speech, Box 55, Byrd Jr. Papers.

40. Notes of conversation between Richard Russell and Robert McNamara, 12 February 1968, Russell Collection, Box 200.

41. Barrett, Lyndon B. Johnson’s Vietnam Files , 584.

42. Downs, Matter of Conscience , 100.

43. CR, 90th Congress, 2nd Sess., 7 February 1968, 2445–47, 2494.

44. CR, 90th Congress, 2nd Sess., 5 February 1968, 2080–85. See also J. William Fulbright to Lyndon Baines Johnson, 7 February 1968, J. William Fulbright papers, University of Arkansas, University Libraries Special Collections, Fayetteville, AR Series 1:1, Box 4:1.

45. Mann, Grand Delusion , 577–79.

46. SFRC, Gulf of Tonkin, The 1964 Incidents , 90th Congress, 2nd Sess., 20 February 1968, 53–53, 76–80, 101–2.

47. Mann, Grand Delusion , 580–81.

48. Mann, Grand Delusion , 600–604.

49. Robert Clyde Hodges, “Senator Albert Gore, Sr., and the Vietnam War” (master’s thesis, University of Kentucky, 1989), 83–85.

The United States did not directly intervene during any Cold War crises in the Eastern Bloc after Soviet military actions in its sphere of influence. In spite of President Dwight D. Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles’s vigorous “liberation of captive peoples” rhetoric, Washington reluctantly refrained from supporting the people’s uprisings in the German Democratic Republic and Hungary in 1953 and 1956. The administrations of President Lyndon B. Johnson and Ronald Reagan also remained passive militarily, following the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and the turmoil produced by the labor union Solidarity in Poland 1980–1981. While Washington supported the East Germans with food parcels and encouraged the rebels with vigorous U.S. propaganda campaigns in Hungary as well as Poland, Washington refrained even from a crusading propaganda campaign in the case of the invasion of Czechoslovakia. While the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was active in 1953, 1956, and 1980–1981, it maintained more of a role of distant analytical observer in 1968. During the Hungarian crisis in 1956 and the Czech crisis in 1968, Washington’s arms were tied. Moreover, by having to deal with parallel crises in Suez and Vietnam respectively, as well as presidential election contests at home during those crisis years, chances for a U.S. intervention were minimal. 1

This then raises the question: why was the Johnson administration so passive after the Warsaw Pact intervention, which stopped the flowering of a daring Communist reform movement during the “Prague Spring”? Was it the fear of going down the escalatory ladder toward nuclear war in case of a U.S. military response to the invasion as in Hungary 1956? Was it the reluctance of committing to a second military conflict given the full U.S. military engagement in the deepening Vietnam quagmire? Did Johnson’s “bridge building” policies vis-à-vis Eastern Europe and his vigorous search for détente with the Soviet Union prevent him from reacting more strongly to the Warsaw Pact invasion? Was it the deepening domestic turmoil at home, spawned by broad popular resistance to the Vietnam War, the assassination of leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, and the contentious presidential election campaign of 1968, which bogged down the Johnson administration? 2Or was it all of the above? This chapter will try to provide some answers to these significant historical issues concatenating during the global crisis year of 1968.

When the Johnson White House heard about the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in the evening hours of 20 August, its crisis management team sprung immediately into action and worked in high gear during the last ten days of August 1968. 3By early September, however, it had become clear that the United States would do no more than protest meekly in the United Nations and deter a spillover of the crisis to Moscow’s Warsaw Pact ally Romania, and potentially even to Yugoslavia, Austria, and Germany. Washington diplomacy engaged in a frustrating campaign to stop accusations both in East and West of prior “collusion” with the Soviet Union based on respecting “spheres of influence” agreements going back to Yalta in 1945. Washington shrewdly utilized the Czech crisis to both strengthen the floundering North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) alliance and alleviate the pressure from the U.S. Congress to withdraw American troops from Western Europe. The skilled crisis management machinery of the Johnson administration operated smoothly in August 1968. Four days after the invasion, the president went on his scheduled vacation to his beloved Texas Ranch, and by late September the crisis mood had largely dissipated. When Richard Nixon entered the White House in January 1969, he quickly resumed Johnson’s détente policies that had to be discontinued due to the invasion of Czechoslovakia. In the end, the larger mid–Cold War agenda of growing superpower cooperation, bridge building, and peaceful coexistence would not be sacrificed to a crisis within the Soviet Bloc. 4

In early May 1968, Eugene V. Rostow, the undersecretary of state, recommended to Secretary of State Dean Rusk to send a strong deterrent signal to Moscow not to intervene in Czechoslovakia. Rostow reasoned: “In retrospect, our failure to deter the Communist takeover of Czechoslovakia in 1948 was one of the most serious mistakes of our foreign policy since the war.” He added: “Firm diplomatic action then—a period of our nuclear monopoly—could well have prevented the Cold War.” Similarly, stating in public that the United States would not intervene during the Hungarian crisis in 1956 “gave the Soviets full license.” What was at stake now was “the process of movement toward detente.” Rostow sternly admonished the secretary of state that the Russians were hesitating: “The moment to give them a deterrent signal is therefore now.” Once they crossed the border it would be too late. Rusk wrote two words on top of the one-page memorandum and initialed them with “DR”: “ No action .” 6Rusk’s minimal comment indeed characterized the entire response of the Johnson administration to Warsaw Pact pressure and later military aggression against Czechoslovakia during the summer of 1968. Rosy CIA analyses about the Prague Spring tended to predict moderate Soviet behavior in response to the Czechoslovak reform agenda of the Prague Spring. Moscow merely had decided “to do some saber-rattling in order to influence the Czechoslovaks to put a brake on their democratization.” 7