508. America in '68: Nightmare in Vietnam (Part 1)

Summary

The Rest Is History – Episode 508: America in '68: Nightmare in Vietnam (Part 1)
Host/Authors: Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook
Release Date: October 28, 2024

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Introduction to 1968: A Pivotal Year in American History

In this episode of The Rest Is History, Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook delve into the tumultuous year of 1968 in the United States—a year marked by political upheaval, social unrest, and significant shifts in the American consciousness. Dominic Sandbrook, whose doctoral research extensively covers this period, provides expert insights into the cascade of events that defined the year, setting the stage for a series that draws parallels with the ongoing 2024 presidential election.

Dominic Sandbrook [00:45]: "It's not quite the effortless superiority that everybody imagines, but I have to say it does help to have a good team."

Lyndon B. Johnson: The Complex Presidency

Sandbrook paints a multifaceted portrait of President Lyndon B. Johnson (LBJ), highlighting both his extraordinary political acumen and his deeply flawed personal characteristics. Johnson's upbringing in the Texas Hill Country, marked by poverty and humiliation, fueled his relentless pursuit of power. His presidency is characterized by significant legislative achievements, including the Civil Rights Acts and the Great Society programs, juxtaposed with his domineering personality and controversial actions.

Dominic Sandbrook [09:44]: "No, he didn't just have a ruthless lust for power; he also had a side that is genuinely progressive and public-spirited."

Key moments discussed include Johnson's infamous "Johnson treatment," a combination of intimidation and charisma used to sway opinions and decisions, and his personal struggles with health issues and his relationship with his wife, Lady Bird Johnson.

Dominic Sandbrook [12:19]: "He is legitimately terrified he's going to have another heart attack or a stroke."

Civil Unrest and the Anti-War Movement

The year 1968 saw a surge in civil unrest across American cities, fueled by racial tensions, economic disparities, and widespread opposition to the Vietnam War. Riots erupted in places like Watts, Newark, and Detroit, vividly illustrating the nation's fracture. Concurrently, the anti-war movement gained momentum, particularly among college students who vehemently opposed the draft and the ongoing conflict in Vietnam.

Dominic Sandbrook [19:36]: "The riots are breaking out because there's growing tension over housing, over jobs, and over mistreatment, but over racism in the northern cities."

Sandbrook emphasizes the government's increasing frustration with the unrest, leading to a shift towards "law and order" rhetoric and the rise of political figures like Ronald Reagan, who capitalized on the public's desire for stability.

The Rise of Eugene McCarthy: A Political Underdog Emerges

Eugene McCarthy, a relatively obscure senator from Minnesota, emerges as a pivotal figure challenging LBJ's presidency. Initially reluctant to run, McCarthy is persuaded by progressive activists to mount a campaign against the Vietnam War, positioning himself as a candidate for peace and reform. Despite a well-funded campaign and significant support from young voters and students, McCarthy's efforts initially falter, reflecting the complexities of American political dynamics.

Dominic Sandbrook [35:05]: "He enters the race on the 30th of November, and it's a very, very sort of funereal scene almost."

McCarthy's unconventional approach, including his preference for discussing poetry and philosophy over traditional campaign strategies, sets him apart from typical political candidates. However, his lack of mainstream appeal and strategic missteps hinder his initial success.

Dominic Sandbrook [48:51]: "McCarthy's campaign is a disaster. It's so inept that it seems that only a paranoid view of his intentions can explain its failure."

The Tet Offensive: Shattering Illusions of Victory

A turning point in the Vietnam War, the Tet Offensive orchestrated by the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese forces, profoundly impacts American public perception and Johnson's administration. Despite being a military defeat for the Viet Cong, the offensive is perceived as a significant psychological victory for the North, revealing the government's misleading assurances about the war's progress.

Dominic Sandbrook [52:20]: "Middle America realizes for the first time the generals have been lying to us. There is no light at the end of the tunnel."

The offensive intensifies anti-war sentiments and undermines Johnson's credibility, leading to increased pressure for policy changes and fueling further political instability.

Dominic Sandbrook [54:08]: "At one of these meetings at the end of February, he literally breaks down in tears."

Johnson’s Exit: A Shocking Decision

Facing mounting pressure from both the anti-war movement and internal party dissent, Johnson makes a momentous decision to withdraw from the 1968 presidential race. This announcement is delivered in a grief-stricken speech where he cites personal and national exhaustion with the war, leaving the political landscape in disarray.

Tom Holland [69:54]: "They're all on it."

Johnson's exit opens the door for new contenders, drastically altering the trajectory of the Democratic Party and the upcoming election.

Dominic Sandbrook [71:15]: "Now, the narrative that had seemed predetermined has now been thrown into total flux."

Parallels to Contemporary Politics

Throughout the episode, Sandbrook draws compelling parallels between the political climate of 1968 and the contemporary dynamics of the 2024 election. Themes of political fragmentation, the struggle against entrenched power structures, and the role of media and public perception echo the historical narrative, offering listeners a nuanced understanding of both eras.

Dominic Sandbrook [71:35]: "So Johnson is very badly wounded... Nobody knows. Now, the narrative that had seemed predetermined has now been thrown into total flux."

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Notable Quotes:

• Dominic Sandbrook [09:44]: "No, he didn't just have a ruthless lust for power; he also had a side that is genuinely progressive and public-spirited."

• Dominic Sandbrook [19:36]: "The riots are breaking out because there's growing tension over housing, over jobs, and over mistreatment, but over racism in the northern cities."

• Dominic Sandbrook [35:05]: "He enters the race on the 30th of November, and it's a very, very sort of funereal scene almost."

• Dominic Sandbrook [52:20]: "Middle America realizes for the first time the generals have been lying to us. There is no light at the end of the tunnel."

• Dominic Sandbrook [54:08]: "At one of these meetings at the end of February, he literally breaks down in tears."

• Dominic Sandbrook [71:15]: "Now, the narrative that had seemed predetermined has now been thrown into total flux."

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Conclusion

Episode 508 of The Rest Is History offers a profound exploration of a defining moment in American history. Through expert analysis and engaging dialogue, Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook illuminate the intricate web of political, social, and personal factors that culminated in the crisis of 1968. This detailed narrative not only sheds light on past events but also invites listeners to reflect on their enduring relevance in today's political landscape.

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Transcript

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Thank you for listening to the Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad free listening, early access to series and membership of our much loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club that is the rest is history.com.

[Tom Holland]

This episode is brought to you by Zip Recruiter. Now Dominic, if you look at most successful businesses, you will notice one thing they all have in common. They all took a lot of hard work. Would you say that's true of us? Would you say that's true of the Rest is History?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

I think that is true, actually, Tom. I think we both do work quite hard on it, don't we? We spend a lot of time preparing the episodes. It's not quite the effortless superiority that everybody imagines, but I have to say it does help to have a good team.

[Tom Holland]

It's a challenge, isn't it, that all companies face hiring. So this can be a daunting task, especially when you need to find someone right away and you have too many or too little options to choose from.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

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[Tom Holland]

Experience faster, easier hiring with ZipRecruiter. Try it free at ZipRecruiter.com history that's ZipRecruiter.com H I S T O R.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

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[Tom Holland]

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[Dominic Sandbrook]

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[Tom Holland]

When great waves break, there is a moment when it seems as if everything in their way must be destroyed. Even those who have watched the water rising and guessed the force of the wind and the tides driving it are shocked by the vehemence of the impact. But in that same moment, the destructive force of the wave is temporarily spent. Whatever has been unable to withstand it is safe in the slack waters of the trough until the next wave breaks. For nearly five years since the assassination of President Kennedy, two long waves of danger had been racing toward the safe and settled shore where most Americans live. The danger of war from Southeast Asia and the danger of rebellion in the heart of American cities. The first week of April, 1968, was the week the waves broke. So those were the opening lines of the suitably named An American Melodrama, a book about the presidential election of 1968 by three journalists working for the Sunday Times here in London. Hence the very portentous British accent with which I did that reading. Dominic?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah.

[Tom Holland]

You have put down in your notes 1968, the most tumultuous year in modern American history. And you would know, because this is absolutely your subject, isn't it? This is the background to your doctorate. You know everything about this. And on that level, it's very exciting. We're doing 1968 in the US, but also, of course, we're doing this against the backdrop of the presidential election in 2024, which will be ongoing as these episodes go out. So perfect timing in every way and.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

There are loads of parallels which we'll be exploring in this series. Hello, everybody. Yes, this is a tremendously exciting subject. So, as you say, Tom, this is the subject I wrote my doctorate about, that book that you quoted, American Melodrama is a brilliant book, actually one of the best books ever written, I think, about American politics. It was by three Sunday Times journalists, and one of them, Godfrey Hodgson, was actually a great inspiration to me when I was doing my studies on this, and he gave me. He had a brilliant contacts book, knew loads of people from the kind of Kennedy campaign, the Johnson White House and so on. So he was able to open his contacts book and I got to interview all these people. It was brilliant. And it's such a rich subject because this was a year for people who don't know why we've chosen this particular year to do a series about. It was the year that was the bloodiest year of the Vietnam War. It saw the fall of President Lyndon Johnson, who seemed all conquering, you know, unassailable. It was the year that Martin Luther King was assassinated, a moment that was followed by riots in American cities. It saw the sort of doomed romantic campaign of Robert Kennedy and his assassination in Los Angeles, California, where, Tom, we will be arriving ourselves in a doomed campaign of our own to do a Rest Is History live show.

[Tom Holland]

Although hopefully we won't get shot in the kitchens.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah, I'm not going to go into the kitchens of any hotels. Just in case it's a real sort of landmark year in American political history because it sees the emergence of a new kind of right wing populism in the form of Governor George C. Wallace, who mounts an independent campaign for the presidency which does better than any independent campaign for. For what, 50 years or more. And is incredibly influential. There is then this extraordinary set piece of the riots at the Chicago Democratic Convention. A clash between the Chicago police and anti war demonstrators, the so called Yippies.

[Tom Holland]

I Love a Yippee.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Played out on national television before an audience of tens of millions. And then finally, as if all this is not dramatic enough, the year ends with one of the great comebacks in American history. The comeback of Richard Nixon, who'd been written off a few years earlier, but wins the presidency in quite controversial circumstances to become one of the most consequential and indeed controversial presidents of modern times. So it's an extraordinary. I think it's the succession of events piled up on top of one another.

[Tom Holland]

Do you think also, I mean, speaking as a non specialist.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah.

[Tom Holland]

It's also the fact that the soundtrack is brilliant.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Of course.

[Tom Holland]

So you have this amazing, amazing music. It's got hippies, all that kind of stuff.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Absolutely.

[Tom Holland]

And you know what it makes me think of, Dominic? The list of all the things that you were describing makes me think of one of the big singles of that year, which is Jimi Hendrix's all along the Watchtower. There's too much confusion. I can't get no relief.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah, it does feel like that. I mean, some of these events that we're describing, so the fall of Johnson, the assassination of King, the assassination of Kennedy, these happen within days or weeks of one another. At the end of the year, Time magazine said it had been, and I quote, one damn thing after another. Indeed. One tragic, surprising and perplexing thing after another. It said that events had been moving at the pace of an avant garde movie edited by Mad Clutter.

[Tom Holland]

And this is an age when there's a lot of avant garde movies with mad Clutter.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah, it's exactly as you say. It's the sense of a succession of events, each one of which would be enough for one year. Yeah, but played out against the soundtrack.

[Tom Holland]

Of the Doors and Jimi Hendrix, all.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Of that extraordinary music, kind of outlandish fashion protests and universities, college campuses, all.

[Tom Holland]

Of that kind of people saying man a lot.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yes. And terrible, terrible slang.

[Tom Holland]

Yeah, I think brilliant slang, actually.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

So in today's episode we'll be talking about the agony of the Vietnam War and the fall of Lyndon Johnson. So perhaps we should set the scene by picking up from the last time we went to 60s America, which was our series that we did about the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963, which of course those Sunday Times journalists mentioned. So listeners to that series will remember that one of the final scenes was that moment aboard Air Force One where Lyndon Johnson, standing next to a blood stained Jackie Kennedy, swears the oath of office and becomes Kennedy's successor. And Johnson is a brilliant character. He's like a character from Suetonius, the 12 Caesars.

[Tom Holland]

Well, nothing wrong with that.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

So to give people a sense of who Johnson is, Johnson turned 60 in 1968. He came from the Texas Hill Country. His father was a kind of failed farmer who'd had to sell the family ranch. And the poverty, the humiliation, entered into his soul. So he is somebody who rather liked Richard Nixon, I was gonna say.

[Tom Holland]

I mean, it's quite a Nixon quality to that.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Definitely. He is driven by this insecurity and feeling of humiliation all his life. He became a teacher and he genuinely had a social conscience. He's very moved by the poverty and the sort of deprivation of the Mexican children that he teaches down there in Texas.

[Tom Holland]

So that's important to emphasize because the image that you get of him is a man who is motivated by a kind of ruthless lust for power, which is true, but not just by that.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

No, exactly. The classic thing that American historians say about Lyndon Johnson. I mean, the one word they always use is tragic. They say he is a man of tremendous gifts, of extraordinary political talent, probably unmatched among post war presidents.

[Tom Holland]

Because he's a fixer, isn't he? Before he becomes vice president and then president.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

He's a brilliant, brilliant fixer. But he is also a monster, as we will go on to discuss. He is in many ways a horrendous man, but one who also has this side that is genuinely progressive and public spirited and has a genuine kind of altruism to it.

[Tom Holland]

And you mentioned Suetonius, the great Roman biographer. Lyndon Johnson is the subject of what people are always saying is the greatest modern political biography. And I have to say I've never read it because it's about 4,000 pages long, isn't it?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah.

[Tom Holland]

And he's only got up to about kind of 1932 or something.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

No, I think Johnson has become. I can't actually remember where he's got to. Has he maybe become Vice president? Robert Caro's enormous, enormous cycle of Johnson biographies, which I have read, I have to say, although they're both hypnotic at times. But there are moments when you're so hypnotized, you're slightly falling asleep because the minutiae are so involved. But he gives a brilliant sense of the kind of sweep of Johnson's career and of these twin forces that are driving him on. On the one hand, the desire to do good, on the other, the kind of monstrousness, the obsessive, the lust for power and for control. He was a congressman in Texas. He got into the Senate in 1948 through unashamed, flagrant fraud. He's a dirty guy, Johnson, but once he was in the Senate, after 1948, he became majority leader. So he leads the Democrats. And as you said, he's not just a fixer. He is the most brilliant political manager in American history. He does something called the Johnson treatment. I can't really see you enjoying this, Tom. Johnson's a huge man, and he would loom over you and he would talk to you and at you, if necessary, for hours. His hands would be all over you. People would often say what Ben Bradley, who edited the Washington Post, said. It was as if St Bernard had licked your face for an hour and had poured you all over.

[Tom Holland]

So he'd be trying to say, I don't know, don't do an episode on Chatham High street or something like that.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Exactly. He would. And he would know. He would have intelligence.

[Tom Holland]

He'd know my weaknesses.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

He would know your weaknesses. He would know your strengths. His hands would literally be on you the whole time. And he would be saying, tom, I know you want this. I know you this. You've got your Bulgarian personal trainer. I know what's going on with you and your family. And he'd be stuffing money in your pockets.

[Tom Holland]

And then also, mightn't he suggest that we go to the urinal together? And he would then urinate in an intimidating manner. Is that true?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

It is absolutely true. So this is another side to Johnson which listeners may find entertaining. He's very scatological. So there's a very famous conversation that you can hear. He taped his conversations in the White House.

[Tom Holland]

Oh, like Nixon again.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

You can hear it online. He rings a clothing company to order some trousers. This is 1964, and he's president, and there's a huge sort of rant. He goes on about the crotch of the trousers. And he's very, very explicit about his equipment and where he wants it to hang, to hang around his body. And this is typical of Johnson. He will have meetings on the toilet. He will call aides, often Ivy League educated sort of self consciously sophisticated kind of Kennedy aides who are still in the White House. Johnson will say, come in, please to talk to me. And he will literally be sitting on the toilet.

[Tom Holland]

So, like Cato receiving ambassadors from Egypt.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Exactly, exactly. And they will find it degrading, humiliating. But he's the President and there's nothing they can do about it.

[Tom Holland]

He's literally the big swinging dick.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Well, he will urinate in the wash basin in front of his secretaries. He will waive his. What the tabloids in Britain would once have called his manhood around. Here's Johnson in front of people. He cheats on his wife, Lady Bird. He gropes women in front of her. He has this line, which I have to say is quite a good line. I've had more women by accident than Kennedy had on purpose.

[Tom Holland]

So, Dominic, can I just ask you something? Because I'm sure it will thrill you as a world expert on this topic.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

World expert, wow.

[Tom Holland]

To know that I have read a book in preparation for this.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

That's exciting, but also terrifying.

[Tom Holland]

Yeah, exactly. So I'm now armed with little scraps of knowledge with which I can impress and infuse. Infuriate you.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yes.

[Tom Holland]

So this is by a guy called Luke A. Nichter, who, from his photograph, he has the look of a man who would enjoy wearing a bow tie.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yes.

[Tom Holland]

And it's called the Year that Broke Politics. It's all about 1968.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yes.

[Tom Holland]

And he quotes Billy Graham.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yes.

[Tom Holland]

The evangelical Christian leader who's apparently a big friend of Johnson. And he says about Johnson at LBJ and Ladybird, I seriously doubt if any couple could love each other more than these two. Is that accurate, or is Billy Graham just. I mean, is he. Is he mad?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

I don't think Billy Graham is mad. I think Billy Graham has been very kind. Right. I think Lady Bird is devoted to Johnson, and he, in a peculiar way, is to her. They're very loyal to each other in one sense, but not in another. But Johnson is a. Johnson is one of. What do people say in America?

[Tom Holland]

He's a dog.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

He's a dog that you can't keep on the porch, I think is the expression. Okay, yeah. So Billy Graham's not entirely right there. Right. Johnson is a man of towering ego. I mean, we should do this, Tom, now that we are, you know, successful or reasonably successful podcasters. He has his initials, lbj, on his belt buckle, on his shorts, on his cufflinks. When you go to the LBJ ranch in Texas, LBJ is stamped on everything. He's even Stamped on the ashtrays, like as if there's a danger that he'll forget his own name. He's very overbearing. He's very domineering. And of course, what this is driven by is this thirst, this almost demented obsession with getting attention and affection. He's always sort of saying to his intimates, everybody's against me. Everybody despises me. And I quote, everybody is trying to cut me down. Everybody is trying to destroy me.

[Tom Holland]

Can I ask.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah.

[Tom Holland]

Is this a residue of his experience as Kennedy's vice president? Because notoriously, who is it says that being vice president isn't worth a bucket of warm spit or something to that effect?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah, everybody.

[Tom Holland]

Everybody says that.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yes.

[Tom Holland]

So it's a kind of institutionalized process of humiliation.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yes. I think there's a degree of truth in that. So I think he had been very much at the bottom of the table in the Kennedy White House. And as we'll discuss when we do our episode about Robert Kennedy in a couple of episodes time, the feud between Robert Kennedy and Johnson was partly predicated on the fact that Johnson felt despised.

[Tom Holland]

Because there's a very class element there. It's class because the Kennedys are all prep schools and holidays in Europe and stuff.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Exactly. They don't have their initials stamped on their ashtrays.

[Tom Holland]

No.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

And they regard Johnson, frankly, I think, as common as what we would call common, as vulgar, as coarse, as boorish. Certainly Robert Kennedy does. Now, after John F. Kennedy is shot, it is very clear to Johnson that a lot of the Kennedy people despise him. They think he's a usurper, he shouldn't be there. One of his sort of friends in the media, a guy called William White, a columnist, wrote in 1966, President Johnson has had to bear a frightful burden in the unremitting hostility of the Kennedy cult and its common attitude that the man in the White House is not simply a constitutional successor, but a crude usurper.

[Tom Holland]

But there isn't at this point, the rumors that he might be behind the Kennedy assassination. It's not that Shakespearean yet. That's a 70s kind of development.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

But I think for a lot of the Kennedy loyalists, it feels like it's poured salt in the wounds that this guy from Texas, who they regard as sort of slightly monstrous, has inherited their hero's mantle. And the person who really feels this is Robert Kennedy, who'd been attorney general to his brother, who feels that he has inherited his brother's flame, as it were, and who is this great sentimental hero of the Kennedy loyalists. Now, Johnson despises Robert Kennedy. He always calls him that boy. And he keeps a file on him because he fears that one day Robert Kennedy will stab him in the back again. It's very Roman, actually.

[Tom Holland]

Yeah, it is, yeah.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

However, at first it doesn't seem like that's at all plausible because LBJ wins a tremendous victory in 1964. In the 1964 election, which is just a year after JFK was shot, Johnson won the highest ever share of the vote in an American presidential election. He beat Barry Goldwater 61 to 39%. Although, tellingly, he lost the five states of the Deep South. And that is an omen of things to come that we'll be picking up on later in this series because LBJ.

[Tom Holland]

Has inherited Kennedy's commitment to civil rights.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

He's inherited it, but he also deepens it. So whether Kennedy could have got that civil rights legislation through is dubious. Johnson, because of his contacts, because of the Johnson treatment, because of all his unparalleled networking skills, he is able to push through two civil rights acts and a voting Rights act. He pushes through what he calls the Great Society, which is a huge program of new spending on health and education programs like Medicare and Medicaid that a lot of our American listeners, well, all of our American listeners will be familiar with, and what he calls a war on poverty. So spending billions of dollars largely through economic growth, but also through widening deficits, in an unprecedented program of what we, I guess, would call in Europe, social democratic kind of legislation to improve the lives of some of the poorest people in America. So this is why historians often say Johnson is a tragic figure, because they look at this, a lot of historians who tend to be kind of left of center liberal, they say, oh, this is brilliant. Can't get enough of this. Love it. And yet by about 1967, so as we approach 1968, there is a sense that things have started to go wrong. And there are two obvious things. I mean, these are the two things that are mentioned by that Sunday Times piece that you read out at the beginning. Number one is massive urban unrest. So riots in the inner cities, effectively. So that started in Watts.

[Tom Holland]

And are these, are these race based riots?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Well, yeah, they are largely riots by African Americans and they are often inspired by police brutality, by resentment of the authorities. There's a sort of sense that the civil rights movement and it's. The campaign has moved northwards, become a bit more militant. Black Panthers, yeah, it's becoming more militant, but that's not really why these Riots are breaking out. The riots are breaking out because there's growing tension over housing, over jobs, and over mistreatment, but over racism in the northern cities or the cities of the.

[Tom Holland]

West coast, but in universities. It's a summer of love, isn't it?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Well, not quite a summer of love, actually. It's more a summer of protest. So the summer of love in 1967 is obviously in the sort of parks of San Francisco, but on campuses, as we will see, it's not so much peace and love. It's got increasingly embittered, impassioned, anti war demonstrations. But we'll get onto that just on the riots. They cook off in Watts, in Los Angeles in 1964, then there's a long, hot summer in 1966, and then a longer, hotter summer in 1967, most famously the riots in Newark and Detroit. And these are not like, you know, when we have riots in Britain. These are riots in which dozens of people, scores of people are being shot dead, thousands of people are injured, looting, burning. Some cities are literally burning for days. And if you Google them and look at the images or look at the footage, these are apocalyptic scenes of kind of burning streets, National Guardsmen standing there with rifles, with them, gas masks on. You know, it looks like something from sort of the end of the world.

[Tom Holland]

Isn't that famous photo of LBJ in a helicopter going over a riot scene and it looks like Vietnam?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah, exactly. There's a sense that a sort of low level civil war has exploded in the heart of America's indecision. Certainly that's the inflated rhetoric that people use at the time. So that provokes a backlash against the administration. There's a sense that people think, gosh, we're sick of these big social programs, we're sick of being improved. Enough of all this talk about poverty. Actually, we want the government to sort all this out, focus on crime. So in the 1966 midterm elections, the Republicans had done really well. These are the midterm elections in which Ronald Reagan becomes governor of California on a law and order, clamped down on the unrest, clamped down on the disorder ticket. So Reagan is suddenly a name to conjure with in the late 60s. But the even bigger issue is Vietnam. So here Johnson had inherited this commitment from Kennedy and then had massively deepened it.

[Tom Holland]

So is it like the civil rights movement that he believes in it, or is he just doing it because he feels, well, you can't turn around an oil tanker?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

No, I think he does believe in it. And indeed, there's a great Historiographical debate between historians, which we can't really get into now because we don't have time, about whether Johnson is personally to blame for getting into the war, whether actually he didn't need to do it, and he chose to do it because he wants to prove himself, because he genuinely believes in it, because he believes in the Cold War, all of this kind of stuff. I mean, whether or not they could have been averted is a subject for another time.

[Tom Holland]

Okay, fine.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

But what we can say is that by 1965, he thinks he's got a blank check from Congress. He's sent the Marines ashore at Da Nang, which is the first commitment of kind of ground troops in Vietnam. From that point onwards, for the next three years, he and his commanders are constantly saying, there's light at the end of the tunnel. We will soon see off the insurgency in South Vietnam, and we'll defeat the Communists in North Vietnam.

[Tom Holland]

One last push.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Exactly. But that light never comes. And so month after month, they're pouring in more and more troops. So by the beginning of 1968, there are more than half a million American troops in South Vietnam, an extraordinarily high number. Now. Of those, about 20,000Americans have been killed by this point, and most of the deaths have come quite recently. And indeed, in 1968, another 17,000 will be killed. And, of course, this doesn't count all those who have been badly injured, who've got massive ptsd, all of these kinds of things.

[Tom Holland]

And has the draft been introduced by this point?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yes, so the draft has been introduced.

[Tom Holland]

So that's an additional cause of.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah, effective conscription, causing great unhappiness among younger people, and especially on college campuses.

[Tom Holland]

Although you do get to rush through fields to the soundtrack of the Doors. So there is that.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah, if you enjoy that kind of thing. I think you just have to imagine the soundtrack, though, Tom. I don't think the soundtrack is laid on for you.

[Tom Holland]

Oh, okay.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

So the question is, why doesn't Johnson just withdraw? And actually, what's happened is that by the end of 1967, he and his aides have developed a kind of bit of a bunker mentality. They're sick of being criticized. So people who dissent within the administration are frightened of speaking up. And Johnson is a very, very proud and prickly man. So one of his closest aides, George Reedy, said of Johnson he had never in his entire life learned to confess error. And this quality, merely amusing or exasperating in a private person. Obviously, neither of us are like that, Tom. Resulted in the case of Johnson in cosmic tragedy. Johnson believes his prestige. He's made this decision to get involved in Vietnam and he believes his prestige indeed. I mean, literally his manhood are bound up with it. Because there's a very famous incident when he's being interrogated by reporters, why are you in Vietnam? Why does America not get out? And he is supposed to have unzipped his trousers, exposed himself and said this is why.

[Tom Holland]

Is that true? I mean, that sounds very suetonious. It's the kind of story that you suspect is not true.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

So it's told by his ambassador to the UN guy called Arthur Goldberg. I mean, did he make it up? The trouble is there are so many such stories about lbj. Why would this one?

[Tom Holland]

Imagine Trump. Imagine Trump is holding a press conference and he does that.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

I mean, yeah, but this isn't live on. I mean, it's not like it's on TV or something.

[Tom Holland]

Yeah, but you're doing it to journalists.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

But Johnson did do this. He did expose himself a lot to people.

[Tom Holland]

Unbelievable.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

And he thought there was nothing wrong with it. So anyway, they have been feeding more troops into this meat grinder. And you asked about the draft, Tom. The anti war movement has been growing really since 1965. It began, I would say, originally with very small kind of pacifist groups, and particularly, you'll be pleased to hear, with religious groups, Christian groups, Quakers and so on.

[Tom Holland]

So it's the Quakers.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

But then it grew and grew and obviously the existence of the draft. The draft conscripts, in total about 2 million people over the lifetime of the war to serve in Vietnam. Now, basically, as a rule, the richer and better educated you are, the more chance you have of escaping because you.

[Tom Holland]

Get a spur in your foot.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Right. Donald Trump did not go to Vietnam. Bill Clinton gotten terrible controversy about in the 1990s about how he had supposedly dodged the draft. If you're a poor student, or indeed not a student, or if you are black, you've got a much higher chance of going. So even though students have a better chance of not going, they are horrified by the existence of the draft. So by 1967, you have huge protests on college campuses. Most famous protest of all, the march on the Pentagon in 1967. More than 100,000 people in Washington D.C. and they very famously try to exorcise the Pentagon and then to levitate it.

[Tom Holland]

So groovy.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

So these are the yippies. It will come as a great disappointment to you, Tom, to hear that they did not succeed in levitating it.

[Tom Holland]

Well, that's the man.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yes. So most ordinary Americans, what do they think?

[Tom Holland]

I know what you're going to say.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Here, but it's true. I mean, what I'm going to say is just factually correct.

[Tom Holland]

This is Peak Sambrook.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

I mean, the thing is actually, Tom, that don't forget I did this for my PhD at the beginning of my historical career. So it's actually doing this that formed my worldview.

[Tom Holland]

Yeah, I know. This is why it's so fascinating.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

The reality is that most ordinary Americans pretty much supported the war. Always supported the war. The one thing they hated more than the war actually was hippies. Was hippies. Correct. Was the anti war movement. And there's a large proportion of them always that thought we should actually fight the war harder. We should go into North Vietnam if necessary, we should send troops into North Vietnam, fight our way to Hanoi and win the war that way. But I think it is fair to say there is a general sense of weariness among the public at large. Even if you support the war, you are sick of it by 1968. And there's a definite sense that progressive metropolitan opinion and especially the college educated young have turned against Johnson by the beginning of 68. So all through this year and indeed all through this series that we're going to be doing, I think you have to imagine that the whole time the campuses are in revolt, that at Columbia in New York and Berkeley in California, there are massive crowds of people with huge hair shouting and waving placards and fighting the authorities. And all because there are.

[Tom Holland]

And there's the, hey, hey, lbj, how many kids did you kill today? That's the famous slogan, isn't it?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Exactly.

[Tom Holland]

And can I just ask, so LBJ is a massive progressive. I mean, he's, he's introduced all this very progressive liberal legislation.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah.

[Tom Holland]

And presumably he thinks that these kind of hippies and progressives should be on his side. I mean, does he feel upset that they're not?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Of course he does. He feels a massive sense of betrayal.

[Tom Holland]

He does.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

You don't understand how Johnson behaves if you don't get how much he feels embattled, betrayed, stabbed in the back, all of these kinds of things, because he thinks these people should be.

[Tom Holland]

Are his people.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

His people, and they should be grateful. I mean, he will say in the White House, these kids, these snobbish kids, they should be grateful to me for all I've done for them.

[Tom Holland]

So he interprets it. They are the elite.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Definitely. He does.

[Tom Holland]

I mean, this is the progressive elites.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Definitely does.

[Tom Holland]

Who don't understand.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

I mean, of course, Nixon thinks this even more strongly in the following administration. And we will get onto Nixon towards the end of this series. So Johnson is sitting there in the White House. It's a bit of a bunker mentality. Terrible news from the cities, terrible news from Vietnam. His popularity is in free fall. It's kind of falling all the time wherever he goes. By the end of 1967, there are massive protests. He cannot visit a college campus without there being a huge crowd of people who will chant at him. Exactly what you said. Hey, hey, lbj, how many kids did you kill today?

[Tom Holland]

I mean, they really are saying that all the time. That's.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Oh, they totally are. Yeah.

[Tom Holland]

Right.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Shouting murderer. Shouting sieg heil.

[Tom Holland]

All of this putting flowers in rifle belts they are doing.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

They did that at the march of the Pentagon. So that's where the famous photos come from. Yeah, that there are soldiers drawn up in front of the Pentagon to defend it from the people who want to levitate it. And, you know, these kind of well meaning students are sort of giving them flowers and stuff. This is very, very late 60s.

[Tom Holland]

Yeah.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

I mean, my heart doesn't bleed for Johnson particularly because I don't think he's a terribly attractive character. But there is no doubt that he feels a crushing sense of political pressure. He says to people he feels like he's living in a continuous nightmare. I feel like a hitchhiker on a Texas highway in the middle of a hailstorm. I can't run, I can't hide. I can't make it go away. He can't sleep. He's got these huge mood swings. He's very depressed. At the end of 1967, one of his critics in the Democratic Party, a guy called George McGovern, came to dinner at the White House to one of the White House kind of banquets. And he was shocked by Johnson at this. And this is somebody who doesn't agree with him. He said he seems a tortured and confused man. Literally tortured by the mess he's gotten into in Vietnam. He is restless, almost like a caged animal. And what is also on Johnson's mind, I think at the beginning of 68, is he's not a well man. Johnson had been a massive drinker and a massive smoker. And in 1955, when he was 46 years old, he had had a heart attack. And he is terrified he's going to have another heart attack or a stroke. He always said that. He used to look at the picture of Woodrow Wilson in the Red Room. Wilson, who had Had a stroke at the end of the First World War and been incapacitated for his kind of last period in the White House. And Johnson says, I worry that that will be me, that I, under all this pressure, I'm going to have a heart attack and that will be the end of me.

[Tom Holland]

Dominic, would it thrill you if I read a line from this book I've read?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Do you know what? I can't think of anything at this point that I would enjoy more. I genuinely would love it.

[Tom Holland]

Throughout his presidency, he was in almost daily pain from angina and popped nitroglycerin tablets like jelly beans.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Oh, well, there you go.

[Tom Holland]

I'm just adding a bit of extra texture.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

That's lovely texture. I think everybody enjoyed that.

[Tom Holland]

I know you'd be thrilled by that.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

So he has been for months, saying to his wife, Lady Bird, oh, I think I might throw in the towel. But Johnson always says things like that because of his self pitying kind of affection craving personality. He's always sort of threatening to leave in order to make people say, no, no, no, please don't, please stay. Yeah, so no one takes it seriously. Meanwhile, from the end of the summer of 1967, some student activists, liberal activists, who are almost sort of professional do gooders, I guess they're the kind of link people between student groups and anti war groups and all of this kind of thing in the Democratic Party, they have been saying we should put up a candidate against Johnson in the Democratic primaries. A dump Johnson candidate. Now this has only really happened once before in 1952, that somebody has challenged the sitting president. So this was when a guy called Estes Kefauver, who you may remember from our JFK series, beating JFK to the vice presidential nomination in 1956, Estes Kefor had beaten Truman. That wasn't a massive story. I mean, it was a bit of a story, but it's not a massive story. So people aren't really thinking about that as a precedent, but they are thinking, we can fly the flag, we can fly the peace flag against Johnson. The Democratic primaries humiliate him and maybe he will change course and someone needs to stand up and say something.

[Tom Holland]

So the aim isn't actually to defeat him, just to make a statement.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

I'm not convinced that they think Johnson can be beaten. I think they've regarded as important to make a moral stand. The one person of course who could beat him, who at least has the national celebrity to beat him, is Robert F. Kennedy.

[Tom Holland]

That boy.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

And these activists go to Kennedy in Washington and they Say, would you consider doing it? Kennedy, as we will discuss when we come to his episode, he doesn't really want to do it because he thinks it's very risky. You know, divide the party. Plus, Johnson will only do one more term, and then it's my go in 1972. So he says, you know, guys, I'd like to. I completely support your cause, but I don't want to do it. So now they're looking for a stalking horse, you know, not a big name.

[Tom Holland]

And Dominic, do they find one? And if so, who is it?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Well, they go around the halls of Congress. They ask a series of people who they know are against the war. So George McGovern, Frank Church, all these kinds of senators, and they're basically all these people say no. And then eventually they go work their way all the way down the list, and they find this kind of name towards the end of the list, this guy from Minnesota called Eugene McCarthy. They go in to see him, and he listens to them. And then he says, okay, I'll do it. And he, Tom, is going to change the course of American history.

[Tom Holland]

Brilliant. Okay, well, let's take a break there, and when we come back, we will HEAR About Eugene McCarthy from Dominic, the man who, more than anyone else in the world, is qualified to tell us all about him. Hello. Welcome back to the Rest Is History. We're looking at the fall of LBJ and Dominic. A stalking horse has been found in the form of Eugene McCarthy, who is Eugene McCarthy and has an eminent presenter on this show, perhaps done a doctorate on him.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

So, yeah, Tom, I don't know how to say this to the listeners other than to say I did do my PhD on him. I am literally the experts. The one thing I can claim to be an expert on. I think, as I've said to you, Tom, nobody in the history of the human race will ever know more about Eugene McCarthy than I did. At least I've probably forgotten a lot of.

[Tom Holland]

And Eugene McCarthy himself is dead. So he's not a rival to you?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

No. And in fact, he and I have unfortunately had a difference of opinion about him.

[Tom Holland]

So what did he say?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Well, I interviewed him for my. He was very generous. He was very hospitable. I mean, we went for lunch. We had very nice time. I met him in Washington and in Minnesota. That was all lovely. But then after my PhD was published, became a book and was published, he said he told the press that I was, and I quote, I apologize to our listeners, he said I was a shit and that my PhD was so bad it was almost libelous.

[Tom Holland]

Right, well, so there's a commendation.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

All I can say is, you know, I'm obviously party pre, so people should make up their own minds after listening to the podcast and perhaps even if they can get down to the charity shop buying a copy of the book.

[Tom Holland]

Well, so what did he say about him? I mean, tell us about him.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

So he was born in 1916 in a place called Watkins, Minnesota, which I've been to, which is. I don't really recommend as a holiday destination. It's a sort of small plains town, German Catholics, largely, who lived there. He's of German Catholic descent himself, despite, I mean, the Irish name, obviously, but it's the German influence, I think, is more important on him. So he's out there in the middle of nowhere in Minnesota. No offense to people from Minnesota. He was educated by Benedictine monks, and then he actually became a Benedictine novice himself. I mean, very unusual.

[Tom Holland]

He's like Tony Abbott, the former Australian Prime Minister. Of Australia.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah. So a very unusual sort of upbringing, I would say, for an American politician, a frontline American politician. In the 1960s. He was kicked out of the monastery, basically, after having a personality clash with his. The novice master, because Eugene McCarthy was a very clever boy and was basically always showing off and laughing at everybody and saying he was much cleverer than they were.

[Tom Holland]

Sounds charming.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

And the novice master said this was. This was very, you know, unchristian behavior.

[Tom Holland]

The sin of pride.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah, sin of pride. So then he got married, and he and his wife tried to set up a kind of Catholic rural commune. This is in the Great Depression. He's really into all this kind of sort of guild business and distributive justice and all these Catholic ideas, and that didn't really work out. He then went to St. Paul, the state capital of Minnesota, and he became a sociology lecturer, and he got into politics. He was elected by the Democratic Farmer Labor Party, which is the name of the Democratic Party in Minnesota for St. Paul, sent to Congress, and then he worked his way up. He was very good at politics. He was very bright. He's kind of handsome. He's articulate. He's a rising star. He's liberal, but he's not too liberal. So he kind of gets on with the big party fixes, people like lbj, the party barons. And he is elected to the Senate from Minnesota in 1958. So he's on the liberal wing of the party, but he's still quite unusual because he's kind of. It's like a European Christian Democrat. Or something, but a very pious one is massively into Thomas Aquinas and Thomas More. He's quoting them in his speeches all the time. His people would go to his office in the Senate and they would say, everybody else has like the Congressional record books about American politics. He has very ostentatiously. They would say, yeah, he has all these books about sort of medieval theology and stuff. And people would always say about him, you know, he wears his learning and his cleverness extremely heavily. I remember this story. It's in one of the oral history interviews at the Kennedy Library. I think it's Ted Kennedy or somebody like that tells the story. They said they once got a plane with him to some speaking function in the middle of nowhere. And they all got on the plane and they're reading like, yeah, the other senators are reading Ian Fleming or they're reading the newspaper or they're doing a bit of work. And he kind of reaches into his bag and he took out this enormous Catholic missile and just sort of reading in front of everybody in a very, very ostentatious way. So that's basically how he carries on.

[Tom Holland]

But he likes poetry as well, doesn't he?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

He also writes poetry, so he's really into his poetry and he's influenced by people like Yeats and kind of modernist poets and he writes his own poetry. Again, Tom, I think I'm probably the only person we'll ever have on the podcast who's read every single one of Eugene McCarthy's poems.

[Tom Holland]

Are they good or derivative?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

I think you can be both good and derivative.

[Tom Holland]

Like Oasis?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yes, like Oasis. He's the Oasis. He's the. No and Liam Gallagher of 1960s American politicians. Yeah, he has a very dry kind of style. I think they are very derivative. But I don't think he's not talentless. Right. I mean, he's still, you know, they're better poems than I could write, let's put it that way.

[Tom Holland]

So he's a. He's a poetry writing Aquinas fan. Yes, he sounds very like he's going to do well in the 60s.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

The other thing that he has now, this is, I think, what he objected to in my description of his career. He has what I think we could safely describe as a very distinctive personality. And Tom, it worries me that you will find this disturbingly familiar, because when I did all these interviews and I went and did. Went through the archives, the same comments kept coming up again and again. So right from when he was at school, his English teacher said, and I quote, he enjoyed it when someone made a of himself in class, one of the monks at the monastery, he had little regard for people not as talented or as sophisticated.

[Tom Holland]

So what was it drew you to write about Sanator Dominic?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah, it was the commonality of temperament. So in that book, you quoted an American melodrama. There's a wonderful description by these British reporters. His fellow politicians regarded him as aloof, indolent, arrogant and annoying. They didn't like the way he spent so much of his time telling wicked little stories about his colleagues to reporters. And the fact that the stories were always pointed enough to draw blood made it all the worse. They thought him, quote, a truly, deeply cynical man, a scoffer, as one put it.

[Tom Holland]

Right.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Now, it's important to say, Tom, that we don't approve of such behavior at all. And we would. The thought of us, for example, telling wicked stories about our podcasting colleagues is unthinkable. Unthinkable.

[Tom Holland]

So it's no wonder that you wrote this book in a tone of deep moral disapproval.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

No, I didn't disapprove. You see, this is the thing. I put all this in the book and I thought this was brilliant.

[Tom Holland]

You thought you're paying him a compliment.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

I thought I was, yeah. I think this is maybe the difference in the British and American sensibility that I actually genuinely thought, this is absolutely brilliant behavior. This is exactly how I behave. But he and some of the American reviewers said, oh, this is very harsh. This is very unfair. Of course, he wasn't like this at all. Well, anyway, right now, he, in the 1960s, has already flirted with presidential politics. In 1960, he had basically, he had backed his Minnesota stablemate, a guy called Hubert Humphrey, for the presidency rather than Jack Kennedy.

[Tom Holland]

So Hubert Humphrey will be a big player in the story as well.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Very big player, yeah. He's a.

[Tom Holland]

Can I just say that? I'll be honest. I would never have heard of either of them if I hadn't heard of them through you.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah.

[Tom Holland]

And the fact they're called Eugene and Hubert. I imagined them both as kind of slightly geeky, Bow ties, round glasses, kind of weedy.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

No, but.

[Tom Holland]

No, I mean, they're. They're massive. Great lads, aren't they?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah, they're great lads. If you like talking about Thomas Aquinas or being kind, which are their respective traits then, I guess. Yeah, you didn't. You'd get on well with them. They'd be good on the podcast. I mean, Huber Humphrey is a great talker, so. Yeah. Yeah, you'd get on well with him.

[Tom Holland]

Well, it just goes to.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

You shouldn't judge on a name.

[Tom Holland]

You know, leap to expectations from names.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

So, anyway, Eugene is backing his Minnesota friend, Hubert Humphrey. The person he despises is Kennedy. He goes around saying to everybody that the Kennedys are total lightweights and playboys. And he's very, very offended that they're Catholics. He says they're terrible Catholics and I'm a brilliant Catholic. He actually said, famously, to a guy called Tip O'Neill, he said, I'm the one who should be nominated. Any way you measure it, I'm a better man than John Kennedy. I'm smarter. I'm a better speaker. And if they're looking for a Catholic, I'm a better Catholic. Of course, I don't have a rich Father Dominic.

[Tom Holland]

Do you know what that reminds me of? And this will mean nothing to you, but it may mean something to quite a lot of our listeners. Yeah, is Gretchen in Mean Girls, when she's having her rant, okay, about Regina George, who's the queen bee in the film, and she compares herself to Brutus and says that Brutus is just as good as Caesar in very similar terms.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

All right. Yeah.

[Tom Holland]

So I wonder if.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

If Mean Girls is.

[Tom Holland]

Tina Fey was informed by that. I don't know.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Maybe she wrote it, Wrote the script.

[Tom Holland]

I don't know.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

It seems implausible that she. Well, you never know.

[Tom Holland]

You never know.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

You do never know. So Kennedy is then shot. Of course, McCarthy thinks, well, brilliant. I could be Lyndon Johnson's vice president. He needs somebody to balance the ticket. And everybody knows he's going to choose one of these two guys from Minnesota, Eugene McCarthy or Hubert Humphrey. And Johnson keeps saying to McCarthy, it's going to be you. It's going to be you. Bring your family to Atlantic City, to the convention, all of this kind of thing. And then right at the end, he chooses Huber Humphrey. No. And McCarthy is absolutely gutted. He is so gutted, in fact, that after this, he basically goes into this massive strop. Yeah, a bit of a. I was going to say sulk. He basically just hangs around in the Senate for years. He's bored. He's incredibly bitter. He's contemptuous about all the other senators who he says are thick and not as good as him. And so he makes himself quite a sort of unpopular figure. But he also turns against the administration over the Vietnam War. So he is genuinely horrified, as some senators are, by the bombing. His kids are against the war, and they influence him. By about 1966 or so, 1967, he. And about A dozen other Democrats have turned against the war. And they say, look, we should do a couple of things. Number one, and these things will come up again and again in this series. Number one, stop the bombing of North Vietnam. We are dropping so much ordinance on them. It is brutal. It's killing thousands of civilians. It is indefensible. And number two, we should have a negotiated settlement. And that means basically everyone gets around the table. And this may mean a coalition government in South Vietnam that includes the Viet Cong. Now, Johnson and the White House say, this is bonkers. The Viet Cong. You can't have them in a coalition government. They would. They would kill everybody and seize power. But the doves say, no, no, no, this is the only solution. So there's this sort of ideological breach. But when these guys come to find their stalking horse candidates, McCarthy. It seems in a way that unlikely that McCarthy will actually do anything about it, because he's made it very clear to a lot of his intimates, and this is something that I kind of found out a lot about when I was doing my PhD, that he wants to leave politics. He actually wants to be like a. The head of a university or something, a kind of college president. But then these guys come to see him, these activists, and he's sitting there in late 1967. He thinks, well, why not? Why not have a. You know, a presidential campaign wouldn't be the worst thing in the world, right? First of all, my kids would like it. Campaigning against the war. And I genuinely, you know, he genuinely is opposed to the bombing of North Vietnam and the waging of the war. And he genuinely wants it to end. It's not like I'm underplaying that side of him, and I think that's very important. But also I think he thinks it'd be a laugh. You know, it'll be a lark, he says, to people. He says to the guy who becomes his campaign manager who told me this story, he said, McCarthy said, it'll just be you and me touring these campuses. Everybody will love us. Will just be able to sit up at night with the students drinking whiskey and talking about poetry, and it'll be great fun. And he also thinks it'll make his name, he'd be able to charge more for. I mean, genuinely, somebody said, he told them it will increase my speaker fees. And he has been told there are a load of kind of progressive financiers and things in New York City who have promised that there will be loads of money, that they will fund it properly. You know, he'll Be traveling business class flights, nice rooms in hotels, you know, it'll all be properly organized. And there's another dimension, he said, to a liberal activist in Massachusetts. I've seen the interview. He said, I had every right to think that Johnson would pick me as his vice president. I invited my family to come down from Minnesota to Atlantic City. But then, of course, he didn't pick him. And so McCarthy said, I vowed I would get that son of a bitch, and I did. So this is what happens. He enters the race on the 30th of November, and it's a very, very sort of funereal scene almost. He announces he's opposing Johnson. He says it's going to be a referendum on Vietnam. The press are astounded. They don't really take it seriously. There's a sort of one of them, Newsweek, he was all gray, like a kind of essence, they said about McCarthy, because he's got this sort of style which is very unflashy, very unexciting. He wants to talk about Catholic philosophy and poetry with you.

[Tom Holland]

And the Punic Wars, I gather.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah. So when he starts campaigning, right, this is the amazing thing. I love this stuff. When he starts campaigning, a couple of days after this announcement, he has this big address to a conference of concerned Democrats in Chicago. And they're all absolutely pumped up. They're looking forward to this furious denunciation.

[Tom Holland]

Usa.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

No, they're not shouting usa. They're shouting, hey, hey. He'll be Jay. Okay?

[Tom Holland]

Yes, of course.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

That's their thing.

[Tom Holland]

Yeah, but they're still whooping and chanting.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Well, I think they're whooping. They're kind of earnest people, Tom.

[Tom Holland]

Okay?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

They are. They're very.

[Tom Holland]

Oh, well, if they're earnest, then they'll love what he serves up.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Well, they're high minded and they want to hear a blistering denunciation of the war. McCarthy gets up and he goes up to the thing and he basically says, I thought I'd give you a bit of a lecture about the lessons of the Punic War.

[Tom Holland]

I mean, he's my man. I'm all over him.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

And they are, they can't believe it. I mean, they're going mad. The activists are so gutted that he's behaving like this. They would say to him, like, we've organized a visit at a factory gate. You're going to go and shake all these hands. And he literally said, I'm not really a morning person.

[Tom Holland]

Right. It's like me organizing trips to Chatham High street or on ferries. And you say, no, I'm not going to.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

He will have a text. He will be given a text of, like, a denunciation of the war, and he'll go up and he'll still read a bit of it, and then he'll get bored and he'll say, I'm going to read you some of my poems, actually. And it is as though he is. And this is exactly what I think he's doing, by the way. I think he is mocking the conventions of presidential politics because basically he thinks he's too good for it.

[Tom Holland]

So LBJ must hate that.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah, well, I think LBJ just thinks it's comical. He doesn't take it seriously at all. Because within weeks, McCarthy's poll rating tanks. So by the end of January 1968, he's behind LBJ by 71 to 18%. And one of the previously vaguely supportive columnists. So in the sort of Village Voice kind of began as a kind of alternative newspaper in New York, Jack Neufield. And he wrote at the time, McCarthy's campaign is a disaster. It's so inept that it seems that only a paranoid view of his intentions can explain its failure.

[Tom Holland]

That is. It's a parody.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

It's a parody, or indeed, that he's been put up to this by Johnson, right?

[Tom Holland]

Yeah.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Like one of those people that runs against Vladimir Putin. You know, he's an approved person to siphon off discont and to be useless so Johnson can cruise to victory. And then there is a stunning twist. We do, like a kind of bombshell.

[Tom Holland]

We do on.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

The rest is history. And this is a real bombshell.

[Tom Holland]

Clouds of war are gathering, right?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

So it's the afternoon of the 30th of January, and Johnson's in the White House when his National Security advisor, Walt Whitman Rostow, comes in and says to him, we've had reports from Saigon. There is gunfire near the Presidential palace and there is gunfire in the grounds of the U.S. embassy.

[Tom Holland]

That's not good.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

And LBJ says, oh, oh, this sounds very bad. And he is right, because this is the beginning of the Tet Offensive, which is the beginning. It's the New year in Vietnam. It is a sort of stunning surprise attack timed for the holiday by the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese soldiers in a hundred different towns and cities across South Vietnam. It's the biggest military operation of the war so far. It completely takes the Americans by surprise. The most famous images of it. So there's one moment which is the Viet Cong fight their way into the compound of the U.S. embassy. I mean, that is a stunning symbolic blow to American pride.

[Tom Holland]

But it is only symbolic, isn't it? Because the Tet offensive actually gets defeated. Yeah.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

And they lose tens of thousands of men. The Vietcong, however, it's the fact that the US didn't see it coming. It's the fact that the fighting has taken place in the citadels of South Vietnamese. And American military power in the capital city is just staggering to American audiences at home. There is a sense that middle America realizes for the first time the generals have been lying to us. There is no light at the end of the tunnel. Yeah. The U.S. embassy is not safe. There's a very famous photo which lots of people will have seen, which becomes the emblematic picture. It's on the 1st of February, so a couple of days later, and it's by a guy called Eddie Adams. And it shows the Saigon chief of police just almost casually shooting this bloke in the head in the middle of the street. A captured Viet Cong prisoner. And as LBJ's aide said at the time, the photo was in every newspaper. And it seemed to capture this sense that America had blundered into a horrendous conflict. I quote, we were sunk in a war between alien peoples with whom we shared few human values. Of course, there's very loaded comments. That's from LBJ's aide, Harry Macpherson. But that I think expresses how a lot of Americans felt. Their troop losses mount in the following weeks. They're using more men proportionately than the South Vietnamese army. Even LBJ's own advisors are beginning to crack at this point. So the Secretary of defense, Robert McNamara, who had been Kennedy's Secretary of defense before he had been seen as the sort of the absolute early 60s, Mad Men style, master of the universe, number cruncher. He'd been a car company executive. He never showed a flicker of emotion.

[Tom Holland]

He's kind of Dr. Strange Love, isn't he?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah, well, he's the master of all the figures and the stats. And he's the ultimate kind of corporation man, I guess, McNamara. And at one of these meetings at the end of February, he literally breaks down in tears. The other ALBJ aides are so embarrassed. And he says to them between kind of sobs, our goddamn Air Force is dropping more on North Vietnam than we dropped on Germany in World War II, and it is not doing anything. And then he turns to a guy sitting along the table from him called Clark Clifford, who's going to succeed him as Secretary of defense. And McNamara says to Clifford, we just have to end this thing, I just hope you can get hold of it, because it has got completely out of control. And everybody is kind of, oh, my God, the generals are asking for more troops. Our guys in Washington are just crying, and they've lost control of it.

[Tom Holland]

And he'll go on to make a film, won't he? Famous film, Fog of War. Fog of War, yeah.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

I've met Robert Namara. I've interviewed him. He cried in front of me. Did he? But, I mean, that was his party.

[Tom Holland]

It's like the French Revolution.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

He cried in front of everybody crying. Yeah. He came to Cambridge when we were doing our PhDs. Everybody who was doing sort of work on this period had to present their work to him. And that was a weird thing, right? He's sitting there kind of at the end of this room, and you had to say, well, I think you thought this, and what happened? And he was actually charming. I remember him coming for lunch, sitting there in his anorak, eating these sort of terrible sandwiches provided by university catering. A bit of a comedown, I have to say, and talking to him about the war. And somebody had said to us before, and he'll almost certainly start crying. That's what he always does. And he did. And, you know, it was kind of what everyone wanted to see anyway. So there's been, I think, a definite shift against the war at this point. It's symbolized by the most famous newscaster. The day Walter Cronkite, he goes to Vietnam, he comes back and he says on television, it's clear to me now, we've totally lost control of this thing. He says, I think we're not going to win. We should negotiate not as victors, but as honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy and did the best they could. And that night, LBJ says to his aides, well, if I've lost Walter Cronkite, I've lost the country. So this is the context in which people are going to go to the polls in the first primary contest. So McCarthy and Johnson, was that any.

[Tom Holland]

Influence on the timing of the offensive?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

No.

[Tom Holland]

The Vietcong kind of thinking about this, they're not interested in that.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

There's no doubt that Hanoi, the North Vietnamese, do follow American politics. They're very conscious of it. And we'll come to this when we come to Nixon and Nixon's election. But at this point, the whole McCarthy thing is such a sideshow. I mean, most people just think it's absolutely going to go nowhere at all. The first primary is going to be in New Hampshire on the 12th of March. And in the grand scheme of things, it doesn't really matter. Have you ever been to New Hampshire, Tom?

[Tom Holland]

No.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

It's kind of New England, but it's quite gritty New England. So a lot of industrial towns, kind of Irish and French Canadian Catholic voters. There are some college towns, but by and large, it's more hawkish than a lot of the kind of New England states. So I think generally the sense was they probably will, you know, LBJ will be fine here. This isn't really massively, you know, it's not as studenty as some places. But the thing is, because McCarthy is actually. His style is quite conservative because he's talking about Hannibal and, you know, St. Augustine and stuff. He doesn't scare people. People think he's like a kind of a sober, restrained university professor. Norman Mailer, who wrote loads about the 68 campaigns, wrote everything in McCarthy's manner, his quiet voice, his offhand delivery, his resolute refusal to etch his wit with any hint of emphasis, gave a hint of his profound conservatism. And I think there's lots of truth in that. And he sort of. He's quite ambiguous. So he says to everybody, he goes around saying to everybody, God, the Tet offensive. What a shambles that was. That shows we're doing really badly in the war, doesn't it? Will you lend me your vote? He doesn't really spell out in very clear terms whether he's for the war or against the war. So a lot of people, actually, I think, voted for him, thinking he would prosecute the war more aggressively than John Slave.

[Tom Holland]

And is that a deliberate strategy or just that his pitch is muddled?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

I think there's a degree of deliberate strategy about it, actually. I don't think it's completely cynical, but I do think there's a sense in which. And a bit of studded ambiguity when you're running in a presidential campaign, as we will see with Nixon, is no bad thing. What he's basically doing, I think, is he is saying, if you don't like LBJ for whatever reason, vote for me. What's the worst that could happen? And, of course, there are lots of people on different sides of the spectrum who don't like lbj, who think, why not a protest vote? It's a bit like voting for the Lib Dems in Britain. You know, it doesn't really matter what they stand for. I just want to express my dissatisfaction. He's the underdog. It's a romantic little campaign yeah, I'll vote for him. But he also has a secret weapon that nobody has ever really thought to deploy in American politics before. Students. People up to this point had thought having lots of students was probably a bit of a bad thing. So Robert Kennedy had sent a message to McCarthy and had said, Tell McCarthy he's going to get loads of student volunteers because they're all very excited about the war. Tell him to be careful. He'll have more than he knows what to do with. Let him look out for that. And this is quite wrong. He gets about 10,000 students. I think their numbers are always inflated. So most of the books you read, there's talk of this huge army, 50,000 people or more. I don't think it was ever that many, but they are. They're all from these kind of prestigious Northeastern universities, New England universities, Yale, Boston University, Dartmouth, Harvard. The great thing that everybody who knows about this story knows is that they went so called clean for gene, meaning they turned up with massive beards and big hair because they're kind of hippiest students. And actually they then shaved off their beards to go canvassing. They made the supreme sacrifice for their country and their cause of peace. Hairies and freaks. That was the sort of claim. Actually, I don't think his students were hairies and freaks. They were square, earnest.

[Tom Holland]

Well, Al Gore is one of them. Right, Al Gore. Al Gore would be the epitome.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

There were people who were really into politics who like would give up their time to go knocking on doors and handing out leaflets. Almost by definition. They're not people who are just smoking loads of dope and growing their beards. Anyway, that's by the by. It's a very, very effective campaign because people in New Hampshire love the fact that all these kids are turning up sort of.

[Tom Holland]

It's like the Mormons, I guess. Yeah. Kind of crisp white shirts. May I have your vote, Mom? All that.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yes, that's. It's exactly, that's exactly what it is. Kind of pretty young women, their best jeans or. Yeah, they're nice dresses. They're coming up, knocking on the door. Can I give you a leaflet? A guy called McCarthy. Oh, yeah, I'll consider it. He's also got some celebs. We love a celeb. He's got Robert Vaughan from the man from U.N.C.L.E. yeah, he's got Lauren Bacall. And he's got Catwoman.

[Tom Holland]

Oh, brilliant. From Batman.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

From Batman.

[Tom Holland]

Oh, fantastic. And this was when Batman was good. No, the Adam west period.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

It's your favorite period. Of Batman. I know. Which is.

[Tom Holland]

And is it true that people get him muddled with Senator Joe McCarthy, who, you know, as in the McCarthy trials. Is that not true?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

I don't think it is true. Now, this is something, obviously, that I had to endure in my brief academic career, because whenever I said I was doing my PhD on him, I had written my first book, and people said, what? Joe McCarthy red scares. Oh, brilliant. Love that. And I'd be like, no, it's the one that no one's ever heard of. But, no, he told this story himself. He made a joke that people vote for him because they thought he was Joe McCarthy. And since then, it was always repeated. People said, oh, everybody voted for him because they think. But I don't think they did. I mean, not that they were.

[Tom Holland]

That.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

It's good to know.

[Tom Holland]

He made a joke. Oh, yeah, he did all the stuff about the Punic wars and the poetry.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Oh, he did make jokes. He would make this very kind of elliptical snide. Yes. I wouldn't say snide, because I don't want him to be haunting me from beyond the grave. I've already done enough damage. But I would say he would make. I think he would make sardonic jokes, Tom. Yeah, of course. I think that's what he would do. Now, the one thing everyone gets wrong is everybody says, I've seen it in all the new books about 1968 that have come out in recent years. A shoestring campaign, an underdog effort. Absolutely not true. His campaign was one of the best finance campaigns to that point in American history because he had all this money from Wall Street. So he spent, I think, in total, $11 million, the most expensive Democratic primary campaign that had ever been waged. He outspent Johnson in New Hampshire by 3 to 1. So he's throwing a lot of money at it. There's a lot of leaflets, there's a lot of posters, and. Well, I was about to say it works, but actually, the one thing that everybody really gets wrong is actually he loses. He still loses. So it's always treated as a victory. Right. So on the 12th of March, 1968, New Hampshire votes LBJ. With all the resources of the presidency, everyone expected him to win a massive landslide.

[Tom Holland]

Well, you know how McCarthy would frame it?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

What would he say?

[Tom Holland]

He would say that Johnson has won a victory, but it's a Pyrrhic victory. He absolutely would, drawing on his knowledge of Roman history.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Well, it's exactly what people say. So Johnson won 49% of the vote. McCarthy won 42% because of some obscure business about delegates that have actually never really been bothered to try and find out why McCarthy wins more delegates. 20 out of 24 delegates from New Hampshire. He has this huge victory party at the Sheraton Hotel in Manchester, New Hampshire. I mean, Manchester, New Hampshire. I've been to Manchester, New Hampshire. I wouldn't massively recommend it as a destination, but anyway, there's loads of kids, you know, shouting victory and doing peace signs stuff. I have to say, they haven't actually won, but, yeah, let them have their moment in the next day's papers. On TV, everybody says McCarthy has basically won. I mean, I know technically Johnson has won, but it's a Pyrrhic victory. Isn't this wonderful? This is the most extraordinary moment in American political history. The monk, the poet, the guy nobody had ever heard of and they thought he was somebody else. He's kind of beaten Johnson, even though he hasn't. What an amazing thing. Hurrah, hurrah. And all this kind of thing. And McCarthy gets up there and he says, I think one of the most ironic things actually that anybody has ever said, if we come to Chicago with this strength, there will be no riots or demonstrations, but a great victory celebration. And we'll be doing an entire episode.

[Tom Holland]

On how that didn't happen.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah. How that didn't quite work out.

[Tom Holland]

Yeah.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

So this is a shocking and seismic moment in American politics. LBJ is very badly wounded. Four days later, Robert Kennedy, who has said he will not run, steps out in the Senate caucus room, the same room in which his brother John had declared his candidacy for the presidency. This is the prince over the water. And he says, I'm running. I'm running against lbj. I have strong feelings about it. It's clear to me now that I can't stay out. So this is a dagger aimed at Johnson's heart. And Johnson, sitting there in the White House, is in shock. He says to an intern of his called Doris Kearns, who later wrote a book about this and became a very well known biographer, he says, I felt that I'm being chased on all sides by a giant stampede coming at me from all directions. Rioting blacks, demonstrating students, marching welfare mothers, squawking professors and hysterical reporters. And then the final straw, the thing I feared from the first day of my presidency was actually coming true. Robert Kennedy had openly announced his intention to reclaim the throne in the memory of his brother. And Johnson is a bully. I mean, it's the sort of thing that primary school teachers always say about Bullies. Oh, bullies are cowards deep down. And in a way, I think there is a little bit that Johnson doesn't really fancy the fight. He gets news from Wisconsin the next primary. His campaign manager goes out to Wisconsin, flies back to Washington and says, we're going to lose Wisconsin. I mean, this won't be a Pyrrhic victory. McCarthy is going to win two thirds of the vote. It's a big student state. We are dead in Wisconsin. And then what? They look at the calendar, the next primaries, Oregon, California, New York. Is Johnson going to lose? Is he going to win any now? He could still win the nomination. You don't need all the primaries. But he is looking at a really, really bruising spring. So he makes a decision. He's going to address The Nation on 31 March to change the narrative. Sunday night, 9 o'clock, live on TV. Nobody knows what's coming. So on that big day, It's Sunday the 31st. Very early that morning at the White House, Johnson's daughter Linda flies in from California. She has left her husband, Chuck Robb, who is her lieutenant in the Marines, who is about to be sent to Vietnam. Linda is heavily pregnant. She is in tears. She says to her father, why is my husband having to go to this country to fight? And I quote, for people who don't even want to be protected. And Johnson, I wanted to comfort her, but I could not. He doesn't know what to say to her. So that morning, that afternoon, he's working on this speech that he's going to give. And that afternoon, it's done. He asks Vice President Humphrey to come in and he says, this is the speech. The speech will be a breakthrough. It will be an announcement that we're stopping the bombing of North Vietnam in an attempt to find peace. And Humphrey says to him, Humphrey's a very effusive guy. Humphrey says, oh, Mr. President, that's a beautiful speech, just beautiful. I think it'll be the best speech you've ever made. And then LBJ hands him a second piece of paper and he says, I've got an alternative ending here for the speech. I think you should read it. And Humphrey reads the speech, bursts into tears.

[Tom Holland]

He's crying as well.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

He's crying as well.

[Tom Holland]

So they're all at it.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

He says, oh, Mr. President, you can't mean it. You can't mean it. It. And Johnson says, I haven't made my mind up. If I'm going to use that ending, I will let you know. That evening, the broadcast starts at 9:00, and there's 85 million people watching. And Johnson is on screen and he looks haggard, he looks exhausted, looks like he's aged a decade in months. And Humphrey still doesn't know which ending Johnson has chosen, which he's going to go with. And only after Johnson is speaking live does Humphrey get a phone call. And it's a phone call from one of Johnson's aides. The President says to tell you he has chosen the second ending. So Johnson is still talking, and he says to people, I realize the desire for peace in Vietnam. I'm unilaterally suspending American bombing of the north, and I'm inviting Hanoi for peace talks. And he goes on talking about what this settlement would look like. And then he looks at Lady Bird, his wife, who is just off camera, and he gives her a little signal with his hand, and that is a sign he is going with this second ending. And he says, look, I know America is very badly divided. And he quotes Abraham Lincoln, a house divided against itself cannot stand. And then he says, with Americans sons in the field, far away, I don't think I should devote an hour or a day of my time to any personal partisan causes or to any duties other than the awesome duties of this office, the presidency of your country. And then the line that sends shockwaves across the country accordingly, I shall not seek and I will not accept the nomination of my party for another term as your President. Unbelievable. The one man whose lust for power had driven him all his life has thrown in the towel. He's done. He's gone.

[Tom Holland]

And so you spoke at the start of the episode about the parallels between 1968 and 2024. And this, I suppose, is the first glaring parallel. A sitting president who had been another Democrat president's vice President who'd become president, achieved his great ambition standing down after one term.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

But the difference, I think, is that Biden stood down this year or withdrew from the race because he was forced to. After weeks of speculation. He had to be winkled out. And it became unsustainable. With Johnson, it's genuinely a bombshell, a. A massive, massive shock. People, you know, they knew it was going to be very tasty, the campaign for the Democratic nomination, but they never imagined that Johnson, of all people, a creature of politics who craves power so much, that he would just walk away. They can't believe it. Everybody is stunned. And for all of his rivals. So that's obviously McCarthy and Kennedy. On the left is Humphrey, his vice president. Then on the right, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Nelson Rockefeller, George Wallace down in Alabama. For all these people, this suddenly changes everything. Nobody knows. Now, the narrative that had seemed predetermined has now been thrown into total flux.

[Tom Holland]

Because when the mighty oak falls, other trees can sprout.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Oh, great metaphorical stuff, Tom. But we talked about the beginning, about this parade, the succession of events. And just five days after this, an even more dramatic moment, as the story of America in 1968 will take another and deadlier twist.

[Tom Holland]

So we will be back very soon with that episode in which we will be telling the story of the assassination of Martin Luther King. And if you want to hear that and the rest of the series right now, you don't have to wait. You can go toThe Restless History.com and join the club.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

And you can, of course, also get tickets for our forthcoming tour of the United States. So, Tom, I think there are still some seats in Philadelphia, in New York and in Los Angeles. So we hope to see you all there.

[Tom Holland]

See you then. Bye.