Jeff Greenfield is a five-time Emmy-winning network television analyst and author.

The 18-hour Vietnam retrospective unspooling on PBS is filled with powerful words and images. Ken Burns and Lynn Novick have assembled incredible footage of key battles, filmed from both sides; they have interviewed not only the usual high-ranking policymakers, but also foot soldiers, bureaucrats, war protesters and veterans from the U.S. and from the North Vietnamese side. They’ve painted a damning portrait of Lyndon B. Johnson’s handling of a war he didn’t believe he could win. They’ve found taped phone calls showing that Richard Nixon lied through his teeth when he told LBJ in 1968 that he’d had nothing to do with persuading South Vietnam’s leader to block peace negotiations just before the presidential election. Other calls show Nixon’s national security adviser Henry Kissinger clearly acknowledging that South Vietnam will fall, with concern only that it not happen until after Nixon’s reelection. (If you are harboring doubts that Kissinger is one of the most contemptible public figures of his time, this series should put them to rest.)

Curiously, it is a piece of the past that is not in the documentary that is, for me, both a chilling forewarning of what is to come and a significant lesson for leaders who are today faced with a dilemma out of which there is no clear path. I doubt Donald Trump has any profound thoughts on the Vietnam War or any interest in its teachings, but his advisers would do well to read it.




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It’s the transcript of the telephone call between President Johnson and Senator Richard Russell, the publicly hawkish chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee. The date is May 27, 1964—before the Gulf of Tonkin incident that led to a congressional resolution giving LBJ a free hand in Vietnam; before the bombing of the North; before the introduction of U.S. combat troops. Some 15,000 “advisers” were in Vietnam, and a succession of generals was taking and then losing political power. While General William Westmoreland and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara were issuing upbeat reports on progress, the men on the ground were telling increasingly skeptical journalists that things were looking dire. Like Trump, Johnson was a novice when it came to foreign affairs, and it showed in his questions to Russell.

“What do you think about this Vietnam thing?” Johnson begins. “I’d like to hear you talk a little bit.”

“Well, frankly, Mr. President,” Russell answers, “it’s the damn worse mess that I ever saw, and I don’t like to brag and I never have been right many times in my life, but I knew that we were going to get into this sort of mess when we went in there. And I don’t see how we’re ever going to get out of it without fighting a major war with the Chinese and all of them down there in those rice paddies and jungles. I just don’t see it. I just don’t know what to do.”

“Well, that’s the way I have been feeling for six months,” Johnson says. “Our position is deteriorating and it looks like the more we try to do for them, the less they are willing to do for themselves,” Russell replies—expressing a view that grew to be a core conclusion of Americans in Vietnam.

“It is a mess,” Russell continues, “and it’s going to get worse, and I don’t know how or what to do. I don’t think the American people are quite ready for us to send our troops in there to do the fighting.”

And then, not for the last time in the conversation, Russell says: “If I was going to get out, I’d get the same crowd that got rid of old Diem [the Vietnamese prime minister who was overthrown and assassinated in 1963] to get rid of these people and to get some fellow in there that said we wish to hell we would get out. That would give us a good excuse for getting out.”

Then LBJ asks the key question: “How important is it to us?”

“It isn’t important a damn bit for all this new missile stuff,” Russell says—meaning that with strategic missiles like the ones the Soviet Union was developing, holding one patch of ground has little if any military significance.

“I guess it is important,” the president says.

“From a psychological standpoint,” says Russell.

But the senator then goes further.

“Other than the question of our word and saving face, that’s the reason that I said that I don’t think that anybody would expect us to stay in there. It’s going to be a headache to anybody that tries to fool with it. You’ve got all the brains in the country, Mr. President—you better get ahold of them. I don’t know what to do about this. I saw it all coming on, but that don’t do any good now, that’s water over the dam and under the bridge. And we are there.”

The talk moves to the pressure LBJ feels from his advisers to remain in South Vietnam, and to the demands from Republicans for escalation. The fear of a Chinese intervention—as happened in Korea—is on both of their minds; memories of Republican attacks on the Truman administration for “losing China” and for the Korean stalemate, gnawed at LBJ, who feared the political consequences of withdrawal.

“Well, they’d impeach a president, though, that would run out, wouldn’t they?” he asks.

“I don’t think they would,” Russell assures him.

“I don’t know how in hell you’re going to get out, unless they [the South Vietnamese government] tell you to get out,” Russell says. Exiting the conflict would be politically feasible, he adds, only if a new head of the country “were to get and say, ‘Now, you damn Yankees get out of here, I’m running the government now.’”

“Wouldn’t that pretty well fix us in the eyes of the world and make us look mighty bad?” Johnson asks.

“Well, I don’t know, we don’t look too good right now,” Russell replies, adding, “going in there with all the troops, sending them all in there, I’ll tell you it'll be the most expensive adventure this country ever went into.”

LBJ does not disagree. As the call ends, the president strikes a mournful note.

“I’ve got a little old sergeant that works for me over at the house and he’s got six children. And I just put him up as the United States Army and Air Force and Navy every time I think about making this decision. I think about sending that father of those six kids in there, and what the hell are we going to get out of his doing in? It just makes the chills run up my back. … I haven’t the nerve to do it, but I don’t see any other way out of it.”

LBJ continues: “It doesn’t make much sense to do it. It’s one of these things, heads I win, tails you lose.”





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I’ve listened to this call and read the transcript half a dozen times, and each time a chill runs down my spine. These two leaders—including the most powerful man in the world—knew a military commitment in Vietnam would be a disaster; they knew there was no vital American interest in such a commitment—but they could not figure out an alternative path. And so, as the Burns-Novick documentary shows, the United States waded step by step into the Big Muddy, until more than half a million men were under arms, and 58,000 of them would die, along with millions of Vietnamese civilians on both sides.

If it were up to me, I would require every policymaker, from the president on down, to listen to this conversation before assuming office. It demonstrates how critical it is not to make policy along a narrow corridor of possibility. Are we really doomed to invest more troops and treasure in Afghanistan after 16 years of fruitless effort? Are we doomed to follow a path with North Korea where the only apparent options are nuclear war or some sort of diplomatic or geopolitical defeat? If the reasonably foreseeable outcome of a policy is disaster, then pursuing that policy because no one can conceive of an alternative is something close to madness. Yet, as this phone call helps to demonstrate, the president of the United States, trapped by his political fears and a failure of imagination, never developed a way to divert a car he knew was slowly but surely drifting toward a cliff.