Folder 60 - Clark Clifford

SR 2636 pp. 18, 19
Re: escalation of war…

I believe that the president's hope still was to win the war. We'd been at it from the time that he took office in November of '63 and here we were now in '68 and he very much wanted to win it. At the same time when his top advisors began to turn, it seems to me that he didn't have much basis then to go against that advice and accept the military and put all those men back in there. Also, maybe even more important, he was exceedingly sensitive to the attitude of the people. That's when there were marches in the streets and big bonfires and young people opposing the war in Vietnam. Many of them leaving the country. Even giving up their citizenship to avoid it. There was the question of getting the men. You were going to have to call up hundreds of thousands of reservists to do this. There was great concern that the people would stand for it. It was going to cost billions of dollars more at a time when that would have been very very unwise, because we were beginning to see the first symptoms of inflation setting in. So there were any number of factors.