Vietnam 1968: The War, the Turmoil, and the Presidential Election

good evening i'm warren finch the acting director of the john f kennedy presidential library museum and on behalf of my library and foundation colleagues i thank you for coming this evening i'm so delighted to welcome you and i'm also delighted to welcome all of those who are watching tonight's program online i'd like to acknowledge the generous support of our underwriters the kennedy library forums lead sponsor bank of america the lowell institute and our media sponsors the boston globe xfinity and wbur i would also like to thank the to thank the support of the national archives foundation for tonight's program we are so pleased that jim dumas deputy executive director of the national archives foundation is here with us this evening tonight's forum is featured in the national archives remembering vietnam initiative remembering vietnam is presented in part by the lawrence f o'brien family the pritzker military museum and library aarp and the national archives foundation we look forward to a robust question and answer period following the discussion and when q a starts we invite you to proceed to the microphones in the aisles to ask your questions lawrence o'donnell has kindly agreed to sign copies of his most recent book after tonight's program our bookstore has copies available for purchase if you are interested the 10th archivist united states david fario had planned on joining us this evening but unfortunately the weather in washington dc prevented his travel here today a navy corpsman himself he has been integral to the national archives exploration of the conflict and its legacy through the remembering vietnam initiative and i'm pleased to share a few of his thoughts on tonight's program now more than 50 years after the united states committed combat troops to the war in vietnam and more than 40 years since the war ended the complexity of the conflict is still unraveling historians continue to make discoveries in the national archives records that provide insight into this critical period we believe it is critical to continue to examine the issues presented by the war and discussions like tonight play a critical role in deepening our understanding of the period reflecting on new scholarship about the war the national archives undertook its newest exhibition remembering vietnam 12 critical episodes in the vietnam war with the goal of fostering continued discussion among those who live during the time period as well as new generations the exhibit examines 12 critical episodes in the vietnam war to provide a framework of understanding the decisions that led to the war events and consequences of the war and its legacy this 3 000 square foot exhibit uses more than 80 original records from the national archives including many declassified documents to critically re-examine major events and turning points in the war we have also developed a vietnam war research portal the national archives website that creates a central space for all national archives resources and content related to the vietnam war for use by researchers students and educators museum goers veterans and those who are curious about the conflict now i ask all vietnam veterans of any united or any united states veterans who served on active duty in the united states armed forces at any time during the period of november the first 1955 to may 15 1975 to stand and be recognized [Applause] veterans as you exit smith hall after tonight's program library staff and volunteers will present each of you with the vietnam veteran lapel pin on the back of the pen is embossed a grateful nation thanks and honors you the united states of america vietnam commemoration is a national initiative and the lapel pin is the nation's lasting memento of thanks 1968 was a pivotal year in the history of the conflict for so many reasons the ted offensive and the presidential election key among them now to examine some of the events of that year in more detail i am delighted to introduce the panel the participants in tonight's discussion we are so pleased to welcome lawrence o'donnell author of playing with fire the 1968 election and the transformation of american politics and host of msnbc's the last word with lawrence o'donnell we're also honored to welcome frederick logaville professor of history and international affairs at harvard and paul surprising women winning author of the embers of war the fall of an empire and the making of america's vietnam war he is also working on a biography of jfk [Applause] and chris oppe professor of history at umass amherst and author of american reckoning the vietnam war and our national identity [Applause] it is also a pleasure to welcome back to the library ellen fitzpatrick professor of history at the university of new hampshire to moderate tonight's discussion thank you all [Applause] okay there's a lot to talk about uh i want to begin since we're here at the kennedy library by asking fred who is an expert on uh the history of the war in vietnam and has written two really outstanding books on the subject that i teach to my graduate students and so i'm very delighted to have the chance to ask you these questions directly on behalf of our audience since we're here at the kennedy library i wanted you to say a few words to provide some context to where the war was in 1968 and the forces that had led to a massive escalation of the war by that point in time when nearly 500 000 u.s military personnel were there in south vietnam how did we get from kennedy's 16 000 advisors in november of 1963 or thereabouts to the full-scale war that lyndon johnson was overseeing by 1968 it's a complex story and i don't expect you to tell it in a few minutes but i wondered if you could talk about what you see as the two or three greatest factors that led to the widening of the war from kennedy's time to lbjs sure well you know i'm one of those people who believes that the transition from from john f kennedy to lyndon johnson actually matters so that particular what if that particular counter factual seems to me has historical importance because i do believe that a surviving kennedy would have approached the prospect of an escalated war differently than johnson did but johnson is who we have as president who becomes president when when jfk is killed i think lyndon johnson for a complex set of reasons which we won't go into here decides though though i do think they have a great deal to do with his perceived domestic political imperatives and his own sense of his own place if i can put it that way in history decides when push comes to shove which is really in the early months of 1965 that he's got to americanize this war i think what's important for us tonight here talking about 68 and i have a i have a piece in new york times this coming weekend which talks about this in the context of his resignation speech march 31st 1968 i shall not seek i will not accept the nomination of my party for another term as your president that's coming up as we all know in just a few days march 31st so in this piece i suggest that what's remarkable about johnson in 19 with respect to 68 is that he knew this was going to happen he said to lady bird his wife he said to other associates in 63 late 63 in 64 and in 65 in effect vietnam is going to be the end of me i'm trapped i have nowhere i can go on this war and so it was as though he had a sense that what happened to him in 1968 in fact would happen that's like it seems to me what's so tragic about this story i also believe that lyndon johnson at the beginning doubted both that the war was winnable even with american ground troops even with massive american air power and doubted that the outcome really mattered to american security so it's a difficult story ellen it seems to me to talk about um but it seems to me that what we have in 68 as you pointed out we have an escalated war by both sides hanoi matches america's each of the american escalations is matched by hanoi you have a stalemated war a war that is not going well westmoreland comes back in late 67 and basically on johnson's orders says there's light at the end of the tunnel my fellow americans we're going to make this thing work and then tet happens so maybe i'll stop there and simply suggest that it's a stalemated war at the beginning of 68 it's a war that lyndon johnson i think understood was going to reach this point was going to threaten his beloved great society legislation and it's in fact what turned out i'm not going to let you totally off the hook because i want to go back to your counter factual which you raise in your book choosing war with the provocative question what if oswald had missed and you suggest that kennedy was not likely to follow johnson's course however as lawrence points out in his book his brother robert kennedy with whom he shared so much only slowly broke with lbj over the war so i'm wondering if you have any thoughts and whether your recent research that you've been doing here about the difference between the two kennedy brothers in this early phase of things has anything become clarified for you have you changed your thinking at all about this i don't think i've changed my thinking about this this part of the book of the biography i haven't yet written but i think that my view still holds which is of course that we can't know because this is a a what if we can't know what a surviving kennedy would have done but for me the best argument is still that if john f kennedy returns from dallas alive um i think he would have kept things percolating through the 64 election i don't think he would have wanted to do anything to to to either escalate the war in 64 or to withdraw in 64. because the smart political strategy was to to keep the thing going but i think that he would have been far more likely than london johnson for reasons that i lay out having to do with his reading of history having to do with the way he used his advisors having to do with the fact that for him the key decision on vietnam would have come in his second and final term when he can no longer run for re-election matters enormously and then i would say that i think he and his brother saw this a little differently even in 62 and 63. i think bobby bobby was more hawkish i think in the missile crisis um jack was really the only one in the room on the x-com who uh was totally committed to seeking a political solution to the missile crisis question but even on indochina it seems to me that there's some daylight between the two brothers now last thing i'll say is of course that a surviving jfk would it would have been i'm not wanting to say here that it would have been easy for him especially in domestic political terms to withdraw from the war but i think he ultimately would have if the alternative is massive escalation it's interesting that one thing you mentioned in the book that you didn't mention just now is that jfk's own experience of war you saw as a variable in this as well and of course that's something that his brother robert did not have he had not seen the kind of action or action at all in the second world war that john f kennedy had nor had lyndon johnson and there's nothing like an up-close encounter with war to to de-romanticize warfare which leads me to you uh lawrence and your uh your book you begin i think uh very powerfully uh talking about uh the stakes in this election and in 1968 and really what mattered and you use this wonderful phrase when you say that life was a short-term gain for young men in 1968 and that was what was really at stake in that year was the life and death of people we knew and i wondered if you could talk a bit about that element of the story yeah so the the war backdrop that i think we should all have in mind as we think about 68 there's a present present day statistic that you should have in mind and that is that in all of america's 21st century war making in all of it afghanistan iraq all of it six thousand five hundred americans have been killed six thousand five hundred that was basically the summer of 1968 in vietnam in vietnam in 1968 alone in one year alone 16 589. so just just imagine what the feeling would be in this country if we'd had a year like that in iraq or afghanistan uh and the big difference of course in 21st century war making is everyone has volunteered uh to be to be in the military in 1968 uh 18 year olds 19 year olds had these draft cards in their pockets that could end their lives it could certainly uh control what they were going to do for the next couple of years and that was a fear that was a constant fear for most people uh who were exposed to it because the thing you have to one thing you ought to remember and this often gets lost and i know all the veterans here know it but in american war making there is a really tiny piece of the population that ever hears a shot fired in american war making it is a minority of the military that actually gets exposed to combat and so uh the the idea that we were sending 500 000 over time uh into this combat zone in a place that they didn't know existed a couple years before was just a a really peculiar and tense uh and difficult social fabric to to be in the middle of and so uh the you know the protests all grew out of that but it's it's this it's this stunning amount of involuntary death that is taking place for a cause that no one can explain no one has a sentence that works for why we're doing this it's not world war ii people didn't need an explanation people knew what the explanation was uh and so that was a peculiar thing that this society had never experienced before and that whole question of why are we at war was a slow one to form in the heads of everyone in the 1960s including robert kennedy who i now look at uh as really just another guy living through the 1960s there was not one person his age who thought the same thing in 1963 that he thought in 1969 about anything never mind vietnam uh and so uh the speed with which people came to these different realizations in politics gene mccarthy being ahead of bobby kennedy others being ahead of gene mccarthy uh that all makes sense when you kind of step back and and look at it and understand that it's the first time in any of their lives that they are formulating any kind of anti-war sentiment against an american war policy it had never been it never crossed through their minds ever mccarthy none of them had ever thought of this and so uh you can allow people a little time in in coming into an entirely new uh area of thinking and it's and then when you're when you throw politics on top of it politicians are afraid they wake up in the morning afraid they are afraid of the other party they are afraid of what the other side's going to do to them and um you know one of the great things about jfk's book title profiles and courage is that in politics it's the other quality that defines most of what happens and i would submit that's the biggest the single biggest difference between lbj and jfk is the degree to which lbj was afraid of virtually everything around him in politics afraid of what barry goldwater was going to say about i'm afraid of what richard nixon was going to say about him afraid of that right side afraid of what the new york intellectuals were going to say about him he was afraid of everything that he saw and and jfk had much more confidence about a bunch of those things and i think a bit more political bravery about some of those things um and so the the condition of the country in 1968 was a condition it had never been in before and since vietnam we have not been in that kind of condition again and i know a lot of 20 20-somethings in the early 21st century thought this was the worst thing we'd ever seen that were engaged in this far-off war that didn't make sense to them they thought george w bush was the worst thing they'd ever seen in the white house and the most insensitive person prosecuting a war against the the uh without the support of those those people who are against it uh but that when you think about the turmoil of that when you think about the protests that we uh saw and heard uh in say 2005 2006 2007 that was that was just nothing that was just the tip of the iceberg of what every day of 1968 was your your quote reminds me of uh eleanor roosevelt's criticism even of jfk that he should show less profile and more courage but you know you can say that i could measure every politician i've ever seen or observed or observed historically and i can describe them in by how much courage they had or how much powers they had and and the cowardice is a is an understandable tactical position that you have it's a fear of the enemy and a fear of what the other side will do politically it's an understandable condition to have which they clearly all had in 68 in abundance as you demonstrate chris this brings us to your book and the you begin american reckoning talking about the vietnam uh the american soldiers in vietnam who very much resembled what lawrence was just saying which is that their conception of going to this war was framed in a context that uh was unlike the way we have viewed wars since vietnam could you say a little bit about that um sure i mean this if we take the decade as a whole which was a decade full of crises but 68 had such critical mass there must have been a dozen events that would in a typical year have dominated the headlines for months some of which we've long forgotten i mean just briefly for example north korea since that's very much on our mind captured an american spy ship and held captive some 83 american sailors for the almost the entire year and that kind of fell out of the newspapers although lbj was continued to be concerned about it and parenthetically actually handled that that issue very well by contrast with the war and some other things but um within the larger context one of the extraordinary things that i'm sure many of you remember is that the beginning of the decade was a time of extraordinary um idealism stimulated of course by president kennedy but by all kinds of sources the civil rights movement of course and an emergent youth movement and youth culture i mean you know even the space program contributed to that sort of sense of unity and idealism and the possibility that ordinary people could change things and that non-violent activism could change things and that the government itself could be an agent of change there was still through the mid 60s very broad support uh in the government to do the right thing and um you know that really collapses in 1968 is a key turning moment in in bringing a new level of of uh of doubt and demoralization and intense division and a real loss of the sense of idealistic unity so that by the end of the decade and one of the legacies that i'm sure we'll get to is a sense that you know peaceful uh mainstream politics really can't maybe ever change the country in a positive direction i think if i may just just to piggyback i think that you sense some of what chris is talking about in johnson's resignation speech so again it's coming in 50th anniversary is in just a few days i think you can sense in there that he perceives that his beloved domestic legislation and the idealism that chris referred to that is at the heart or sort of at the roots of the great society legislation is now under threat because of the war so johnson himself in that moment and he prepares two versions of the speech one which includes his his announcement that he won't seek the nomination of his party and one which doesn't so he's he's not certain right up to the end what he's going to do but the point is i think what chris has described not only did we see can we see in hindsight that 68 marked a change there were people including the president who was no dummy who could see that in fact because in large part not exclusively but in large part because of his war decisions and in in particular making this a large-scale american war this was now under threat it occurs to me that we think so much about the framing of uh american involvement in vietnam through the lens of the cold war and the cold war ideology that shaped our intervention but the frame of reference for warfare itself was really the second world war and the experience of the fathers of some of the men who would go to vietnam in that war and uh when kennedy was elected it was only 15 years since the end of world war ii and this had been of course a great victory for the allies and the united states central role in that so the concept of warfare itself uh evolves and changes through this this particular war which brings us i think to the ted offensive which was the inauspicious start to 1968 and uh ted is widely seen as the turning point in uh american opinion towards the war but the story is more complicated than that lawrence do you want to say a word or two about it well you could argue tactically that the united states military succeeded uh in the tet offensive but it didn't look that way on tv and that's when we discovered and that's when american politics discovered uh that now that we do televise wars the way the war plays on tv is what's going to matter most uh and so the it was experienced in the united states as two things as first of all um the the revelation of some kind of lying on the part of the american military who were kind who were giving us the impression that this was impossible uh that the north vietnamese forces could not mount any any kind of threatening offensive uh and and then that the cost of this was too high that whatever we were fighting about over there this body count is too high and uh the the problem that would continue for lyndon johnson and it's really summarizable in in a sentence is it's just that he could not he could not allow himself to be the first american president who lost a war and so so he could know that this isn't going well he could know that these generals who've told given him a certain optimistic read have given him optimistic reads before that aren't true and he could have the political instincts to understand how this will play how this war is playing negatively in in the country but he was trapped he was trapped in that spot that he didn't want in history as uh the first president who would lose a war so his continued commitment to it was always not so much a commitment to win but a commitment to punish through you know through the art of war to punish the north vietnamese to the point where they would negotiate some kind of thing that lyndon johnson could say was not defeat for the united states and then he ended up being followed by nixon who was guided by the same principle couldn't couldn't be the first president to lose a war what other than tet drove johnson out of the race we had the beginning of the mccarthy campaign the anti-war movement the new hampshire primary if you had to prioritize these factors what do you think was most salient well march 12th jean mccarthy wins the new hampshire primary which i i thought he won because i was a high school kid watching it on tv here in rochester and uh he did so well that it felt like he won he came in second uh to lyndon johnson which i didn't know for decades and uh so but you know he's perceived to have won uh march four days later uh march 16th bobby kennedy announces his candidacy so now uh lyndon johnson has gene mccarthy running against him which was a certain which seemed to be no problem until the votes were counted in new hampshire then he has bobby kennedy running against him uh by march 16th by that saturday after the tuesday new hampshire primary and then march 31st lyndon johnson says i'm not running for reelection uh it's it's inconceivable to me that there is anything that could have happened in vietnam that would have gotten lyndon johnson to make that announcement i understand that he made it at the end of a speech that was in the works for weeks about vietnam but if he had crushed gene mccarthy in new hampshire if gene mccarthy had gotten three four percent of the vote if bobby kennedy didn't get in the race i don't believe march 31st would have been lyndon johnson announcing he wasn't going to run fred you look like you're poised to comment i'm as calm as can be so i i i guess i see it just a little bit differently i think that i think you're quite correct that if those things don't happen if mccarthy doesn't perform as well as he does if rfk doesn't get into the race i agree with you but they do i mean if if so if you're asking me ellen asking us to rank order or at least talk about why he makes the choice that he makes on march 31st and maybe maybe lawrence and i in a sense don't disagree we're just looking at the question differently but i would say for me at the top of that causal hierarchy is the war i think it's the war ultimately that is key to his decision and that's connected obviously to what happens in in these primaries so the war i think he has concerns about his own health that are legitimate he's not sure he'll live four years uh his poll numbers are going down again largely it seems to me because of the war and then he sees the threat that these other democrats represent to him but i would still i don't know whether you agree chris but i would put i would put the war well they're interconnected let me say something more contextual which lawrence began to say there had been this enormous propaganda a quite successful propaganda campaign throughout 1967 especially in the fall to convince the american public that things were really going well that we were winning the war that the enemy was uh tiring and demoralized and it's in its numbers declining and um so that the fact that uh communist forces could pull off this massive uh largely uh a surprise to most americans anyway uh a nationwide uh attack uh and to bring the war into the city centers and bases where they had never gone before even the grounds of the american embassy was enormously shocking i mean the point was you that we've been told that we're winning the war and now we're fighting all over the place and i think the the politic the anti-war politicians capitalized on this brilliantly i mean mccarthy said you know we've been told that uh we had secured 65 65 percent of south vietnam and now we can't even secure our own embassy or or uh you know in his stump speech rfk that from the first speech and on he capitalized on a line that came out of the ted offensive which i'm sure many of you remember which is the devastating way in which the united states militarily anyway successfully launched a brutal counter-offensive to drive communist forces back out of the urban areas through lots of shelling and bombing and much of it very indiscriminate with lots of civilian casualties there was a a town in the delta called ben tray where roughly a thousand almost a thousand civilians were killed by the american bombing and an american journalist asked the major what what happened here i just see you know stacks of bodies and the major said this is the line you'll remember it became necessary to destroy the town in order to save it which you know completely reveals the sort of contradictory aspects of the war in rfk in his speech said well if it becomes necessary to destroy all of south vietnam will we do it and if we will why do we get into the war in in the first place and it became a kind of you know a metaphor of all the of what was so hypocritical about american involvement i i also think that walter cronkite's extraordinary sign off is that the term we use but on february 28th when he talks about how the only conclusion we can reach is that we're in a stalemate and he calls for negotiations and he says or you know negotiations by an honorable people who did the best they could seems to me that is for for a lot of americans around the country for whom walter cronkite is is second to god that's a very very important moment in this i do think there's a way however that the ted offensive we can exaggerate the importance of the ted offensive there's a different way of looking at it which is to say that it doesn't change as much as you think and here i don't only mean that the war continues for another five years it's also the it's also the case that even before the ted offensive at the highest levels of government there's there's deepening pessimism not not withstanding the propaganda campaign yeah that's happening in 67 it's also the case that after tet both the americans and the north vietnamese wage furious war and there's the fact that in 69 1969 the year after as many americans die in vietnam as died in 1967. so we should be a little bit careful about saying that tet changed everything well along these lines to think about the political distance that we've traveled uh i won't say progress that has been made since 1968 uh consider the fact that gene mccarthy was really running a single-issue campaign around his opposition to the war in vietnam american troops are in harm's way the president is insisting that the war effort requires our full commitment and yet this anti-war candidate is gaining traction and gaining traction far beyond just the students that are clean for jean and up in new hampshire knocking on doors and ringing doorbells and so when you think about that scenario of having a sitting president being challenged by someone within his own party with a full-bore commitment on the part of this country like it or not being that vulnerable clearly other things are at work other than the ted offensive or mccarthy himself as a candidate and you uh lawrence in your book talk about the uh underpinnings of this dump johnson movement and allard lowenstein and his role in really sort of spurring this grassroots activism i wondered if you could comment on that as a factor in all of this well that was all about vietnam there would have been no dump johnson movement if there were no vietnam war and all of domestic politics played the same way if all the same things happened in domestic politics so that was entirely based on on the war and alex lorenstein was the guy who got gene mccarthy to run he was running around for a couple of years well starting in 1967 and very busily looking for a candidate to be the dump johnson candidate because lowenstein who was this gadfly liberal around democratic politics who everyone knew strangely everyone from eleanor roosevelt to bobby kennedy to local republican congressmen in strange places he was friends with don rumsfeld eleanor roosevelt and bobby kennedy at the same time so there's one of those and uh and so he he wanted to get the vietnam war on the ballot on the presidential ballot in the democratic primaries and he needed a candidate to do that and so the first place he went was bobby kennedy and he tried to get bobby kennedy to do it and bobby kennedy broke his heart and thought about it for a minute and said no uh al lowenstein kept going back to bobby kennedy and bobby actually started to think about it a little bit and then each time he would say no each time he would think about it a little bit more he'd be slower in saying no meanwhile gene mccarthy is sitting there in 1967 and the senate foreign relations committee listening to this testimony about how things are going in vietnam and he has an under secretary of state nicholas katzenbach in the middle of his testimony at one point say that he thinks katzenbach and the state department believe that declarations of war are outmoded uh and this enrages uh bill fulbright who's the chairman of the committee gene mccarthy who's a member of the committee uh who believe that these the constitutional separation of powers on war making is important and they don't believe declarations of war are outmoded and mccarthy does an interesting thing that i that i i understand from my days of working on senate committees on the staff is that he doesn't actually get enough public fight with katzenback in the room mccarthy is so livid when he hears this that he gets up and leaves because he doesn't really trust the way he would handle himself in an angry public fight about it but when he steps out of the the uh that committee room that you see uh on tv there's a right on the other side of that door there's a conference room that all the committee rooms all the committee hearing rooms have and it's in that room that he says to his chief of staff with a new york times reporter present that's off the record but he says we have to get this war on the ballot and if i have to run myself to do it i will and that's after lowenstein has been trying to get him uh and eventually you know bobby really does break l lowenstein's heart and says no convincingly lowenstein gives up on bobby uh and then it gets kind of funny you know because he would go to mccarthy and mccarthy would say uh you should talk to kennedy and he'd say i talked to kennedy and and mccarthy would say well talk to george mcgovern and he'd go goldstein go talk to george mcgovern mcgovern would say you should talk to gene mccarthy and uh and so that's how you ended up with gene mccarthy and uh lowenstein couldn't quite believe it uh when mccarthy uh finally said yes uh toward in the fall of 1967 announcing uh at the end of november of 1967 and it was the most modest announcement you could imagine he didn't really even say he was running for president he just said he was going to he was going to be on the ballot in a few states he hadn't even decided he was going to run in new hampshire and he would not mention lyndon johnson's name he wouldn't say i'm running against lyndon johnson bobby's campaign announcement was similarly modest in its way and not personal and not you know targeted in any way at lyndon johnson uh and that's because both of them were embarking on something that they found inconceivable which was challenging the incumbent president of their own party for the nomination and it wasn't just any incumbent president it was the most masterful politician at the nitty-gritty of politics who had ever been sitting in that oval office he made jfk look naive about politics compared to lyndon johnson and so they were they were choosing to challenge the most fearsome possible incumbent they could challenge but just the very principle of it gene mccarthy was he actually came in second in 1964 in lyndon johnson's search for a vice presidential candidate to put on the ticket with him it was he was going to pick humphrey or gene mccarthy and uh gene mccarthy uh didn't get it humphrey did but that's how close mccarthy had been with lyndon johnson uh so it was a at a personal level what they what each of them were doing what bobby was doing what gene was doing was something they both found inconceivable just months earlier just months earlier you couldn't have gotten either one of them to to to agree to do it so johnson's withdrawal from the race and his speech in which he announces at the same time at the end of march of 1968 this hall to the bombing was widely seen as a victory for the anti-war forces we know the celebration was premature to say the very least why didn't johnson's exit from this in your view turn the tide within the democratic party i mean we can point to the assassination of robert kennedy in june of course but there's a moment of exhilaration and yet we know that the outcome is uh that humphrey is nominated in in uh the summer time and leaving aside for a moment the general election that follows with nixon what was what within the democratic party happens at that point in your view there's obviously the tension between uh the robert kennedy and uh mccarthy forces who are split yeah well the the it's unclear because it turned out to be such a mess it is and and there were two candidates that were peace candidate or anti-war candidates um it's it's unclear exactly how big the anti-war vote was even within the democratic party because you have to remember most states did not have primaries uh and so you didn't get a clear voter expression about this around the country certainly within the establishment of the party the delegates who choose the nominee at the convention uh they went with hubert humphrey because uh they were going with the most most importantly because they were going with the establishment candidate because that's what they do that's kind of what their their job is and humphrey was able to get the nomination without running in a single primary that's how unimportant the primaries were and incomplete as a nominating force but but johnson uh was left kind of politically adrift after march 31st because he he suddenly uh what the idea and the idea expressed in the speech was now i'll be able to devote myself entirely to the pursuit of peace to the pursuit of a solution here and i can i don't have to be bothered by uh campaigning but that was like cutting off an lbj leg you know campaigning was was the the way he made all his calculations uh he also discovered uh what uh lame duck presidents discover is that people don't listen to them they do not listen to them though the way they were listening to them five minutes ago when he was possibly going to be president for another four years uh and and he still was wrestling with how do you do this how do you negotiate with these people who he does not understand these are not the french these this is not this is not you know britain this is vietnam he had no conception of who these people were in in north vietnam or in south vietnam who he was relying on uh or and or negotiating with he he so it was he he was incapable of unlocking this puzzle that would and remember when the puzzle gets unlocked he still has to be somehow perceived as a president who did not lose a war right so that puzzle becomes no easier after announcing he's not running friend how do you see it i i agree uh i do have this sense that he still hoped i don't know whether you agree lawrence but i think he still hoped to be drafted in the year for that so that we have to remember that this conditions it certainly conditions his approach to the war i think what i find interesting about the negotiations in 68 is the degree to which lyndon johnson drives a very very hard bargain i think he when it's clear he's not going to be the nominee there's a part of him that prefers richard nixon over hubert humphrey because he believes i think legitimately that richard nixon is more likely to prosecute the war in a forceful way than than hubert uh than hubert humphrey will uh and so i think johnson as i think you're suggesting i think he struggles with this we should also bear in mind notwithstanding as ellen pointed out the vow in his march 31st speech to reduce the bombing the bombing in fact increases in the final months of 1969 both below the 19th parallel in north vietnam and in laos and it's always going on in south vietnam and it always go we've we we've four times more bombs yeah we focus on rolling thunder which is a which is a mistake but but i mean don't yeah i mean i think with the other dance the original question about sort of what happens to the sort of the police part of the the peace party it has to be said right i think you would agree um mccarthy was a terrible candidate at least not willing to uh to engage the people he needed to get the nomination i mean he wouldn't pick up the phone and talk to dick daley aloof yes and or once he lost he wouldn't rally his troops to vote for humphrey which might have made a difference in the outcome of the war i mean i don't think it would have ended the war you know uh in a month or even a year but it might have ended the war a couple of years earlier i mean it's an open question another one is counterfactuals but you know because he did have samuel huntington as one of his major advisors on the war not exactly a dove i have this idea that that michael cohen boston globe columnist and also an author of a book on 16 he suggested this but i wonder what people think about this if robert kennedy survives he actually strengthens humphrey's position ultimately both in terms of the of the democratic party but also in the general election because the surviving kennedy um johnson and his people would not have wanted us the nominee this is this is michael's theory so he permits humphrey more freedom of maneuver to come out against in opposition to the war at an earlier point and it strengthens humphrey in terms of the the the ultimate race against nixon in the fall because as we know humphreys closing the gap in those final weeks once he comes out in opposition to the war however belatedly i think it's i'm somewhat dubious about that but that's another detour we won't go to right now but one thing i do think is important we haven't talked about so far is what else is going on in the country in this period and in particular martin luther king is involved in the poor people's campaign there's increasing attention on the de facto segregation that exists in our society and the the plight of african americans minorities in our cities and uh the reality of poverty and king himself his interest in the poor people's campaign and his opposition to the war in vietnam converge in 68 and robert kennedy the perception of robert kennedy as somebody who could bridge these various divides in the democratic party does raise the question of whether uh kennedy uh could have somehow healed these fractures that remain in some sense uh to this day and perhaps have staved off the peeling away of white ethnic working class voters from the democratic party which is a is underway in this period as well so uh but let me throw nixon into the mix here he's important uh nixon as we know had a plan to end the war uh it turned out that it was going to be delayed by several years while he widened the war geographically but how does nixon in your view emerge as a moderate in this context and manage really to to reinvent himself uh and what world did the war itself play in his ability to do that chris do you want to comment on that yeah well he had one great advantage he had he was preceded by two democratic administrations all they had to say is they had the opportunity and they screwed it up so i'm going to come you know it's time for a change and i've got i'm going to bring peace with honor a phrase that you know johnson has already sort of developed and that's all he had to say and did say and you know meanwhile behind the scenes as lawrence points out in his book and other people have now talked about he was going behind the scenes to try to you know make clear to the president of south vietnam that if uh if if he remained uh you know dead set against uh any participation in the uh halting but ongoing beginning of peace talks in paris that he'd get a better deal under nixon so he was paying he was playing a hawkish game behind the scenes and a moderate won publicly and even further behind the scenes i would say that richard nixon and henry kissinger his national security advisor when the doors were closed my sense is that they were as pessimistic as anybody else that an independent non-communist south vietnam could be preserved over the long term and so you have to ask yourself even though as ellen points out in some eyes he's a kind of a moderate in all of this how can you continue the war for another four years even allowing for the fact that they're in a difficult position when they come in with half a million american ground troops on the on the scene in south vietnam if that's what you believe in your heart of hearts when the doors are closed because they're not moralists they're politicians and uh they johnson continued the war and nixon continued the war because they could not bear what the perception of them would be politically if they didn't it it is i mean to that's the most economical way i could say and that's in domestic terms you're describing yes it's not about your opponent right it's not about the world it's about what is the right wing gonna say uh you know what is what are the republicans going to say about johnson uh what you know what's going to what will they say about nixon and that and that thing that neither one of them could ever figure out is uh how do i how do i avoid being the first president to lose a war they couldn't figure it out briefly you know one of the more famous of the pentagon papers that were released by ellsberg was a 1966 document by an assistant secretary of defense john mcnaughton who said never mind why we got into this war you know whether it was containment or the domino theory that's meaningless we're staying in vietnam for one reason and one reason only and that is to avoid humiliation it's about national image reputation credibility that particular one it's more about the geopolitics in that particular sense it's america's humiliation but i think lawrence is right in suggesting and i think you also agree that for the presidents it's not so much about america's national right it's personal credibility personal credibility it's to some extent the partisan credibility much less so than natural can we talk just for a minute about your question which you then you yeah which is about robert kennedy because i'm curious to know what the two of you or the three of you think about this i think i i just in a sense i think i think humphrey always had the inside track so i'm not sure that 68 was kennedy's year but i think about 72. robert kennedy would have been 46 years old yeah he would have been 46 years old in the 72 countries sorenson's trying to tell him he wouldn't have had johnson's shadow or he wouldn't have to think about ldj in his calculations so i think my own answer to your question is that yes a surviving robert kennedy could have performed that very large function that you set for him but it's really four years later well i think i well my scenario does have bobby running in 1972 but running for re-election uh because you the thing that has been lost about humphrey as it was that there was a worse the worst candidate of 1968 there's it's a tie kind of between george romney who flames out before they even count a vote so he's kind of the cartoonishly bad candidate humphrey was the absolute worst candidate anybody saw when he came out of the gate and he made his announcement it was the most horrible speech given so far in the campaign by anyone it was flat it was deadly the pros all started to panic right away uh they thought you know hubert doesn't have it uh and so and by this time of course uh you know bobby kennedy is only weeks away from being killed but but uh but humphreys start of his campaign was atrocious it was terrible and people like richard daly by the time you're getting to the convention in chicago are making phone calls talking to steven smith stephen smith's making phone calls to teddy and hyannis saying uh daley is very interested in kennedy because they saw hubert humphrey as a terrible terrible candidate and so humphrey was absolutely going to get in after johnson got out uh he got a slow start getting in because the assassination of martin luther king ate up several weeks of decent interval that humphrey had to live through before he could announce uh but uh the the idea that you could go into chicago uh with uh with bobby kennedy as a possibility against hubert humphrey given what we saw in all of the platform fl fights and and all of the strength that was actually surprisingly emerging uh on the anti-war side within the convention apparatus i think bobby kennedy would have ended up being the the both the compromise candidate and most importantly the guy who can win there wasn't a person there who believed hubert humphrey could win the presidency it was just well gene mccarthy certainly can't that's out of the question and let's just go with the guy we know and you know there's a lot of a lot of personal dislike of gene mccarthy that was just really made it utterly impossible and mccarthy had none of the kind of guts and professional apparatus you need to go into a convention and take a nomination so that was never going to happen but i think bobby kennedy could have gone in there i think he could have taken that nomination away from hubert humphrey and remember humphrey loses to nixon humphrey terrible candidate who at a certain point has a hundred thousand dollars that's his entire campaign treasury uh in the fall they had no money uh humphrey running this horrible campaign nixon beats him by less than one percent of the vote less than one percent of the vote if bobby kennedy is on that ticket against richard nixon uh that goes the other way i think the uh the humphrey campaign when you think about his slogan of the politics of joy after two assassinations the midst of a horrific war with tremendous casualties got this reaction he got laughed at he really did it was not the way to go uh there is one we're gonna turn to your questions in a moment but i wanted to raise the issue of george wallace who there is a farther right position here that makes nixon appear to be a moderate in the midst of all of this and the backlash already underway against the uh anti the more extreme elements of the anti-war movement the yippies the uh the uh events at the democratic convention in chicago uh i think also presumably uh is a variable in moving nixon into a position that uh we might not have seen him as occupying without that far right uh rising uh threat that will you know gain traction over time as well yeah the george wallace's uh campaign manager told me during the trump campaign that when he listened to donald trump he was listening to george wallace that it was just all the same and they actually did use a lot of the same language and they both uh george wallace and trump shared uh this same um uh style and reaction to the the eruption of hecklers in their audience uh if a heckler started yelling at george wallace as many did when he was up at dartmouth uh giving a speech uh he loved it he absolutely loved it and he would yell back at them and call them communists and pinkos and talk about you know yell something at them about their sandals and their ponytails and their beards and all this stuff uh and you cut to 2016 and donald trump is up there saying i want to punch him in the mouth as they're dragging the heckler you know out of his uh out of his hall uh it was all stylistically wallace 1968 that's that's what you were seeing in the the trump rallies well there's a rich and dishonorable history to be told in all of this but uh it's time for us to turn to your questions uh i think there are microphones on either side of the room uh please approach uh if you want to direct your question to one of the the uh guests uh please say so and i'd ask you to restrict your question to a question please it's a tremendous temptation as all of us know when you get before a microphone to start talking incessantly but if you could really just ask a question and not give a speech uh i would all be very grateful so sir go ahead i'm sorry i have to just give one statement okay if i may before context there's been a long history related with the vietnam war about the issue of how veterans were treated some of it's mythological some of it's true my question is to what extent do you as historians believe the attempt to undo those past wrongs to veterans has affected the quality of history that people understand really what happened in vietnam it's a very interesting question chris i want you to take take uh thank you for your question chris is the man to answer it very important question um if i can give it a short answer it seems to me that one of the successful efforts to in public memory since the reagan years to forget the most poisonous and toxic memories of the vietnam war was to do two things one to demonize the memory of the anti-war movement and two to resurrect a respect or reverence a kind of reflexive honor to all who serve in uniform as a category to regard them as automatic heroes and more than heroes kind of hero victims going back to this point that they have been mistreated and that we have to make up for that and we we've seen that in spades since uh 9 11 i think and um well i have no trouble honoring national service you know i i think we need to honor those and there many of you in the audience who stood up against in the most vibrant and diverse anti-war movement in our history stood up against the war in vietnam so i honor you but we don't we don't have a peace memorial we don't have a peace highway we don't have a peace holiday and even uh martin luther king who does have a national holiday he's not remembered for his extraordinary anti-war speeches i mean just and then i'll shut up but the one incredible moment in a speech he gave exactly a year before he was murdered he said you know i can't in good conscience go into black ghettos and tell young teenage boys not to pick up arms uh as long as i'm not also denouncing the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today my own government and that that just has gotten erased uh from from memory so i do agree with your premise that um that that um a lot of memory has been brushed under the carpet or sanitized about the war that needs to be recovered and recovering a more a a a broader memory a more respectful memory of the anti-war movement is a place to start let's go over here yes uh yes uh i'd like to speak on behalf of the free press without that you folks wouldn't be here tonight and we know trump is doing his best to say the press is the enemy the people there was a huge secret kept in august and september of 1968 when nixon was negotiating behind the scenes with the south vietnamese government please don't start negotiations with the north it'll help humphrey get elected too bad the press wasn't able to release that in 1968 nixon never would have been elected and in 2016 when trump was the his campaign was the object of a criminal investigation by the justice department he kept going after hillary being under investigation the press never knew that trump was a subject of a criminal investigation in 2016. had we known that hillary will be president today so my question is lawrence do you know much in your book about nixon's almost treasonous behavior really getting the war extended so he get himself elected yeah that's uh covered in detail and so the press didn't know about it uh at all so there was no option for the press to report on it but lyndon johnson discovered it the cia brought it to him the fbi uh went to work on it johnson ordered more wiretaps uh and more surveillance on the people involved in it and so johnson really knew exactly what was going on and johnson himself called it treason uh he called it treason in phone calls that were taped at the time uh that that captured what he was trying to do so johnson was really stuck because this is you know late october when he's discovering this and putting the pieces together and and nixon at a certain point knows that johnson knows johnson communicates with a republican senator in the hope that that senator will tell nixon johnson knows what you're doing you better stop what you're doing uh but i think nixon understood something about the predicament johnson was in that no one else did and so when it came down to it johnson threatened uh the possibility when he was talking to the republican senator of going public with this of letting the new york times know what nixon was up to letting the washington post know what nixon was up to and he thought about it very seriously and in the end and i think nixon knew having lived in the white house himself that this would be the white house wise man advice on this the the advice that nixon got was you cannot possibly go public with this uh first of all you don't want to reveal how we know this you don't want to reveal how much surveillance we have on our embassies you don't want to reveal sources and methods okay but uh the other reason you can't go public with it is it people won't necessarily believe it it might look like just a democrats political ploy to try to hurt the republican presidential candidate uh and so so so johnson had these weighty presidential issues and this what i love about it is it's a genuine presidential decision it's it's a decision that only you only have to make in that job uh that decision of do i let this become public or do i keep it uh secret and you know the the cia methods all that stuff is serious stuff to consider when when you're in the white house when you're in that chair and so johnson ultimately did not allow it to become public uh and nixon you know squeaked through uh to a victory but um that's all laid out uh you know step by step in my book and a really important book on this uh is the great john aloysius farrell who used to work in the boston globe right over there who has written the definitive biography of richard nixon and it was jack farrell who discovered bob haldeman's handwritten notes which are basically scenes of you know nixon standing here telling haldeman what to communicate uh to the south vietnamese and there's alderman's handwriting of you know uh telling them you know nixon's saying how do we throw a monkey wrench into this thing and the possibility of uh peace talks uh developing toward the end of the campaign so that's all really important and it is our our first known and uh only known case of collusion with a foreign power to elect a president in this case a republican president it is however just technically uh you can use this in a fit of anger if you want to uh you can use the word treason but you will not be legally correct uh the supreme court has held that it is technically impossible to commit treason without a declaration of war uh you have to actually be aiding and abetting the declared enemy in the war declaration that's why the last treason case in america was of course during world war ii because that's the last time we were operating under a declaration of war uh so uh treason is the word everybody throws around these days but it's technically not accurate i just want to assume i just want to affirm the the premise or the first point you made sir about the the importance of the press and it seems to me especially in this day and age but also if we focus on the vietnam era it seems to me it's an absolute golden age of american journalism and i want to stress that that the journalists who went in vietnam in most cases went there believing in the mission believing in the in the in the stated purpose of america's involvement in vietnam many of them i think also came back still believing that that the preservation of it of an independent south vietnam was a worthy and legitimate goal of the united states however what they did it seems to me men and women over a period of many years was to investigate to find out what was actually happening both militarily and politically in south particularly south vietnam and it's an extraordinary record that they've left us i taught a class this last semester in which undergraduates had an option of writing a paper on uh david halberstein and or or neil sheehan both of them harvard graduates and to listen to these students who then went in and investigated what those two particular journalists but there are many of them both print and television it was just a revelation for these students and so i guess in a in a funny way i just want to affirm your point about the importance of of what those journalists did then and why we need them now uh uh we've got quite a few people that want to ask questions so as much as i would like quick short questions we'll move to quick short answers as much as we can go ahead there's two names that you haven't mentioned uh any of you uh robert mcnamara and uh general westmoreland uh i was in during the vietnam war and both of them should have been court-martialed and shot as far as i'm concerned but i'd like your opinions please court-martialed or shocked that's your choice pick one can you do both yeah i have nothing positive to say about uh either of them though uh you know i was reading something i was that you were writing that was at least pointing out that unlike any other of these war managers kissinger especially comes to mind nixon others he was the one that actually did express some regret now it was hedged and it wasn't a complete apology and he said it was a failure of judgment not morality and a lack of information you know over you know we're denying the fact that he had plenty of access to contrary information in 1964 and five that he just automatically described as illegitimate but uh yeah i mean this came 30 years too little too late uh and um the other thing to remember is that he had personally come to the conclusion by at least 65 earlier earlier that that the war was on [Music] and militarily bombing wasn't working and that he continued to advocate publicly uh the both the progress of the war and then and then the needed escalation but what i do say in that in that piece that chris is referencing is that he agonized over this yeah and even that is all too rare in terms of our public officials on that precise point i think this is uh evidence in favor [Music] of your position fred on the kennedy counter factual it is hard to imagine jfk having that evidence presented behind the scenes over and over again and already seeing it himself in that cbs interview he did with walter cronkite uh expressing doubts about it that he would have he would never admit error and he did agonize over the deaths but he did and one huge difference between jfk and lbj is that people were not afraid to tell jfk something jfk did not already think right and that was the big problem people became afraid of telling lyndon johnson the things that he clearly did not want to hear about vietnam having a president with the self-confidence to be able to not only absorb but to invite criticism makes a difference yes i'm going gonna go here and then get two over here this is a great follow-up i'm a combat veteran i was wounded seriously i was in shelter naval hospital for a long time in the summer 67 but i was here in 2003 and they had all the big wigs westmoreland was here kissinger and and he was in larry's seat and kissinger got up and said that he was afraid to lose face the administration didn't want to lose face and i hear the same theme tonight that no one wanted to lose face johnson the other politicians yet twenty thousand american soldiers died because they didn't want to lose face and i find it unconscionable that that we send people to war and and it so they don't lose face we're still doing it now you know i i i went to boston state and i became an educator and i just i listened to these people talk and i listen to these shows and i it's sickening and uh today i was at the pt at ptsd in brockton hospital in va and a guy came out walked he's walking through his truck really handsome young kid no legs and i turned to my friend and i said what a sad thing and i said we're sending people to die get maimed people don't want to lose face i just don't get it i really don't and uh i just wanted to follow up what he said i mean how do you feel about that larry you you're you you have a lot of conscience uh the last man to die for the mistake as john kerry put it was april 29 1975. we don't know what that date would have been if gene mccarthy has not decided to run for president and put the vietnam war on ballots in 1968 if the first anti-war candidate which probably then would have been bobby kennedy did not run until 1972 does that mean that that movement would have been able to force the end of that war some years later than it did nixon for the rest of his life uh henry kissinger still complains complains that congress forced them to shut down this war that is a complaint against democracy that is a complaint against the elected representatives saying enough and they did force the nixon ford administration to shut down this war they were changing their minds their kids were getting them to change their minds jean mccarthy's daughter mary mccarthy who was a student uh at radcliffe at the time was far more anti-war than gene and against the war quicker and than than he was the the the people were moving in this direction because they were learning things that that the kissingers and the robert mcnamaras were refusing to admit and people were changing their minds and and that that kissinger to this day sees as somehow undermining the presidency and undermining the presidency's attempt to prosecute uh and and the war in vietnam and to have it you know have it have its way in vietnam uh it is it is a fundamental misunderstanding on the part of kissinger and the people who make that argument that oh you know this would have turned out something differently if they had not been forced to end this thing and in fact as i think uh chris you point out that what this ultimately gives way to is uh the dick cheney criticism of the vietnam syndrome that is the reluctance because of this war to commit american military might which is seen as a negative like we shouldn't be too thoughtful about this and too mindful of the history how about over here yeah i'm a combat marine fighting my rifle at the enemy and i'm an educator for 36 years and to arm teachers is the dumbest thing i've ever heard in my life over here my name is joe cabadas i i'm a veteran for peace and i want to thank all the peacenicks who protested against the war because i didn't stay my full tour in vietnam i got out early so i'm a person that i really love you people who help me now uh 68 we forgot about the melee massacre that happened it happened all over vietnam throughout the whole war uh another thing is i went with a group of vietnam veterans we went to kazakhstan in 1988 and we met the soviet soldiers who fought in afghanistan they were telling us the exact same story we were telling them didn't know where the enemy was what was going on the war was a debacle and then i said we'll never go to afghanistan now i look back at 68 we had joan baez we had uh the sloan coffin we had these people politicians were in for peace now we don't hear anything about peace at all it's not even mentioned i'm out in the street five four days a week giving out flyers against one of the afghanistan a lot of people say they volunteered for it uh they just walked by not even mentioning it and i look around and i said there's no peace movement left i have no idea why because today is the 15th anniversary of the war in iraq today and we've been 17 years in afghanistan story how how many stories do we hear about afghanistan and no tax your children are going to have to pay for this because they're it's a credit card warrant is that not true so we had one last thing all right hundred thousand head injuries three hundred thousand head injuries we all worry about gronk how his head is then we have uh 22 suicides a day of veterans 22 suicides of any group that would be looked upon as a disaster in the healthcare what's going on i mean what happened to america thank you very much okay so let me just hear some more comments or more questions the i think the question really is why uh why we don't where is the peace movement today well i mean i'll quickly say i think we have a lot of anti-war opinion the polls indicate that but we don't have a broad anti-war movement or culture and that's a real difference to the 1960s part of it is the lack of a draft i heard people shouting that but that's only a part of it i think there has unfortunately developed as well a level of public cynicism about the ability of ordinary people to have any effect on what seems like a permanent war machine that's impervious to any criticism and has a kind of life of its own um uh and uh yes so there are other factors but i mean i think that's i just want to say what echo what chris said i think that's profoundly important the cynicism and cynicism it seems to me you know if we were if americans were somewhat naive at the beginning of the vietnam war to put it a little too simplistically at the end of the vietnam war people are too cynical i mean that's one of the important uh results of the war and it seems to me that cynicism is corrosive cynicism undermines our belief in democracy i'm just repeating what chris has said and it occurs to me that in the vietnam era we see the completion of the interstate highway act it's an extraordinary thing in the vietnam era we see the construction of thousands of public schools universities we see the great society the legislation here that politicians from both parties uh helped bring about and the sad thing for me in 2018 is that it's very hard for me at least at this political moment this certain this current moment to imagine that happening and i think it's a result of this sentence we've also seen the sanitizing of war so that the war is a smart bond being dropped down a smoke stack on your television at night rather than what we saw those of us who lived through the vietnam war every single night in the footage that americans were exposed to relentlessly that brought the war to their home into their living rooms so let's go to this gentleman here good evening bobby and so my question uh concerns the fact that we get regrettably the vietnam war was largely fought by blue-collar working-class people the vietnam war wasn't really shared i mean the sacrifice of those fighting in vietnam war wasn't equally shared by all socio-economic classes and so i'm wondering if uh the three of you would be willing to comment on that and also um would the outcome uh be any different in your view if the um if the children of the elites as well as the children of the working class families um had uh equal numbers in in terms of share of sacrifice and whatnot in the war chris chris was the expert on this chris wrote a marvelous book called working class war which speaks to this well you know i agree that if the children of congress people and corporate presidents were as vulnerable to the draft as working class kids in dorchester there might have been a uh an even more intense anti-war opposition sooner that could have made a real difference now with the all-volunteer force uh there still is a class in equality in the military and there is there is something there's some real truth this idea of economic conscription uh that is to say they're not being formally conscripted but economic circumstances and economic uh inducements bonuses college and so forth are drawing people in for that reason uh above all others for in many cases um so that that inequality in our society and not just in the military is as pervasive as ever uh and you know part of having more democratic foreign policy is everyone having a skin in the game now i'm i have not yet accepted uh or endorsed a draft though i'm i'm much more on the fence about that than i was before my only holdout is and unless and until congress takes its constitutional responsibility to on matters of war and peace uh i don't want to make my five sons vulnerable to a draft where an imperial president can continue to make war and peace decisions you know without public accountability so uh as a footnote in 1968 and and during the vietnam war there were a lot more elites serving in combat so-called elites than there are now uh president johnson had son-in-law in vietnam uh john kerry uh you know went from yale to vietnam volunteered you don't see that now and and members many members of congress had sons in vietnam at the time many senators had sons in vietnam at the time uh you don't see that at all now that has disappeared and because you could in 68 as at least one person did uh get a note from your doctor about bone spurs and get out of the draft a lot of people were getting those notes in 65 and 66 and 67 and 68 and so the under the the understanding became clear that this is unfair that's why they switched to a lottery that's why under president nixon was switched to a lottery and then there was really no real protection about it if your number came up you were going and it didn't matter uh what family you came from and i saw that happen all the time when it switched to the lottery the other thing that happened uh in switching to the lottery is that you intensified a certain kind of opposition from people who thought they were going to escape this but you then when you gave my brother billy this high number he relaxed he just kind of sat back and went okay i have a high number i'm not threatened anymore and i think i ended up with my lower number going to a few more peace demonstrations than he did and so the you know so that and then nixon actually ended the draft uh completely uh before the war ended uh so all of that was perceived at the time and and dealt with gradually there's time for one more question we'll take it over here thank you um i'm a vietnam era that worked for bobby kennedy uh presidential campaign in new york in 68 when he was killed um since then read a fair amount about about the theories that uh jfk might have been killed um possibly cia possibly other kind of things for reasons of his potential opposition to the war i know it's not certain you discussed a little bit but i'm wondering to what degree in your book lawrence for example do you cover the the possibility that bobby kennedy had that same suspicion about about um his brother being killed you know by nefarious forces in the government well on november 22 1963 the first thing that bobby kennedy did was throw himself into fits of suspicion about everyone and the cia was one area of suspicion and he summoned the director of the cia to his home to say to him you know what happened here and the cia director had to swear a catholic oath to him that he the cia had absolutely nothing to do with it but bobby kept thinking for a few hours about all the different angles including organized crime every single angle actually just about every angle that you've heard of in various conspiracy theories went through his mind on that first afternoon uh he eventually uh by the by the next day uh had actually completely given up this this area of thought he just stopped he just realized uh there's nothing i'm going to be able to do with this uh i'm not going to solve this and for his own sanity i think also uh he just pulled out of it completely and then and then the opposite happened you couldn't get him interested in it you actually couldn't get him interested in what the warren commission was doing he didn't even want to bother to talk to them but he also had he also went through a period in which he was in deep despair for many many months after the assassination and i think and i don't think i'm the only one who thinks that that was in part i think because he felt a certain amount of guilt he wondered at least bobby did whether his very hawkish position on cuba for example his determination to get castro had that somehow created you know whether it's oswald alone um or whether it's some sort of conspiracy i think he struggled with that for many many months yeah after after the he was that's part of what he was thinking that day what did i do who who did i animate who who is who's getting revenge based on something i did either as attorney general or in other roles and there was an endless amount of of possibilities for him to think about can i just make one quick comment since we've talked about a number of sort of what-if questions while they're fascinating and we get asked them all the time as i always tell my students it's hard enough just to figure out history as it actually happened never mind that what might have happened if three or four different variables how do factuals help us better understand well well i think they could potentially the best historical utility all right i think uh what i would like to say on that point is that there remains a great deal yet to be learned about robert kennedy and i look forward to the all of his papers being opened and to historians to continue to work and to tap that vein to better understand the kennedy presidency as a whole and the remarkable story that is uh really uh memorialized and uh and uh really kept alive here at the kennedy library so i want to thank all of you for coming for your questions and to the library for inviting us for this discussion thank you you

Channel: JFK Library

Views: 3,075

Keywords: John, F., Kennedy, Presidential, Library, and, Musuem

Id: 5N9Ut4oEApI

Length: 92min 32sec (5552 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 21 2018