JUST ANOTHER AMERICAN PRESIDENT

Trump’s second term has been cruel and disastrous, but in those respects he has a lot in common with his predecessors

President Lyndon Johnson and General William Westmoreland on the back of a jeep, visiting troops at Cam Ranh Bay in Vietnam, December 23, 1967. / Photo by Bettmann Archive/Getty Images.

One of the best books I’ve read on the Lyndon Johnson presidency and the Vietnam War is The Lost Crusade: America in Vietnam, published in 1970 by Chester Cooper, a longtime intelligence officer who ended his career as the CIA’s man in the White House. The book is little known, and though it was full of new information, it was passed over by almost everybody at the time it came out.

Cooper was the quiet man at many of the most significant events in the postwar era, including the vastly misunderstood 1954 Geneva Conference, but the crucial story in his book is his inside account of Johnson’s refusal to respond to many offers for peace talks with Hanoi. Simply put, there were far more serious than publicly known offers of talks put forth by North Vietnam in the later Johnson years when bombing by US B-52s was at its peak.

Hanoi’s only condition, Cooper explains, was that America halt its bombing before the talks began, but Johnson believed any cessation would be a sign of weakness. One serious peace initiative from Hanoi in early 1967 was dashed by a major American bombing attack that could have easily been delayed: “The American bombing during the same 24-hour period in which we launched a major new negotiations approach did not stem from a conscious high-level decision to sabotage the efforts of peacemakers, nor was it a ‘carrot/stick’ attempt to signal Hanoi that, even though we were making a new diplomatic initiative, the pressure was still on. Either of those would have at least had the merit of reflecting some thinking on the subject at high levels of government, but there was none at this point in time; instead there was inertia, lethargy, and a reluctance to ‘upset the President,’” Cooper writes. “The President dug in his heels when presented with any suggestion to modify or delay bombing timetables, let alone to de-escalate the bombing.”