A War That Changed the Presidency

TIME Washington Bureau Chief Hugh Sidey has watched three Presidents agonize over the Viet Nam War. Now that the agony may be coming to an end, he reminisces about the individual styles and policies of the three men, and offers some observations on the effects of the war on the presidency:

As pickets marched before the White House, chanting demands that Richard Nixon sign a peace agreement immediately--in perhaps the last sacrament of the sidewalk institution of protest--the dusk slowly faded and an autumn moon rose over the Executive Mansion. The White House lights came on in melancholy beauty, highlighting a glistening new coat of paint applied for the Inauguration of the next President, whose term will embrace the bicentennial celebration of the Republic. Maybe tranquillity of one kind or another is to be the reward for two centuries of survival. But life will be different in the old mansion, with its understated elegance. The presidency has been stretched and tormented in the long decade of the Viet Nam War. It has suffered a dramatic decline in respect, yet perhaps it has gained some new wisdom too. It is more powerful than ever, more feared than ever, and at the same time it has revealed its human dimensions more than ever. Some of the mysticism has vanished. Americans need leadership as much as ever, but they may never again respect the presidency as much as they used to, finding that they have been brought so close to it by war and its internal ferment. Still, they may understand it better. If they do not give it the old trust and support, they may at least reduce their expectations about what one human being can do in the Oval Office.

Indeed, the whole story of Viet Nam and U.S. Presidents is a human one. The memories march out now as hope rises that the long war is ending. There were evenings that John Kennedy used to anguish about Viet Nam. He was one part the Irishman who wanted to show the flag and another part the scholar who remembered reverently when he had gone to see the ailing Douglas MacArthur and the old general had told him never to get involved in a war on mainland Asia. Kennedy bleated and complained about the news stories out of Viet Nam that ran counter to the cheery calculations of Robert McNamara's Pentagon computers and the bravado of the generals. But he was always tugged by reason and maybe, just maybe, had he lived to face the crunch he might have overwhelmed his gut, which said fight, and gone by his head, which suggested that Communists were not as bad as they used to be and, besides, wars on mainland Asia were not an American calling.

Lyndon Johnson lived by his gut, and it told him to fight. We rode those airplanes in the campaign of 1964 as he inhaled his Cutty Sark Scotch and thumped our chests and squeezed our knees and vowed that he wasn't about to send American troops to fight Asian battles. We discovered the "Alamo syndrome" later, the unalterable cast of L.B.J.'s character that made him go through life like Davy Crockett or Matt Dillon, never backing from a dare, never going into a fight he didn't intend to win. We were spirited out of the American embassy in the Philippines one incredible day in 1966, locked up at a naval airbase and flown into Viet Nam to await the arrival of the President on his first visit to the "front." He came dressed in his cowboy brown twill, looking 10 ft. tall and with the presidential seal on his jacket over his heart.

In a strange way on that strange day, there was pride in the air. A beleaguered President, doing what he conceived to be right, had come to see the best men America had on the battlefield. The tragedy of the war was washed away from those few hours. Johnson went through the hospitals, sat in the mess hall with boys who had been in foxholes a few hours earlier. Then, in a sweltering room of the officers' club, he looked proudly at his field commanders and heard the ghost of Teddy Roosevelt calling him and he told them to come home and put the coonskin on the wall. More troops. More bombs. But no coonskin. The result was that Sunday night in 1968 when Lyndon Johnson announced an end to the bombing of North Viet Nam and an end to his political career.

The great peace marches were in Nixon's time. Nixon was a lonely figure, preferring at first to watch the football games, remote, disdainful, vague in his promises for peace. Yet Nixon's story of Viet Nam is largely untold. It is bottled up in this singular man who brooded alone at Camp David and with his yellow legal pad sat endless hours with Henry Kissinger, balancing all the forces facing him, both political and military. We watched from the outside as the inexorable march to the boats began for American troops, and predictions of disaster were too numerous to count.

There were even days when perhaps discouragement penetrated Nixon's outer tenacity. We sat in Kissinger's high-windowed office only 50 yards from hordes of peace marchers shouting obscenities and heard the professor say quietly: "In the end, Viet Nam may destroy everyone who touches it." After the Cambodian invasion, Nixon took his walk at dawn along the mall among the youthful invaders, talking about his travels to foreign lands and college football teams. Then he went off to the Mayflower Hotel for scrambled eggs, strangely rejuvenated.

Still the troops came out, but not with a whimper. Nixon applied muscle. From the secret musings came not only the orders for the Cambodian invasion but for the excursion into Laos and then the ultimate shock, the mining of Haiphong Harbor and the renewed heavy bombing of the North. They are all ingredients of the impending peace no less astonishing today than when they happened. Then there was Peking and the mind-boggling view of Nixon raising his glass to Chou Enlai, a part of the Viet Nam equation, and the scene just a few months later of Nixon eating his bowl of cereal in the Kremlin as he examined yet another pressure point to bring the war to its close.

When Henry Kissinger came to the White House press room to tell what was happening in the negotiations and proclaim "Peace is at hand," the weight of these long years was behind him and no doubt gave his voice its unusual gravity. Photographers and reporters pushed and shoved and strained to see and hear in the overcrowded and overheated room. It was as it had been for ten years, but yet it wasn't. Many in the press had witnessed the whole decade and seen all of the actors in the drama. Though conditioned to deception, hardened to failure, they rushed to the phones to flash the news with a note of exuberance never heard before.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.