Dr. Spock turns against LBJ

Source: Spock, M.D., Benjamin and Mary Morgan. Spock On Spock. New York: Pantheon, 1989. pp. 174 - 183.

". . . In the summer of 1964 Lyndon Johnson's campaign committee invited me to support him on radio and television in his bid for election. I told them I certainly would, both as a citizen and as a spokesman for the disarmament movement, because he had said while campaigning in the spring and summer of 1964, "I will not send American boys to fight in an Asian war." (Kennedy had sent twenty thousand "military advisers.") I went on radio and television in his support. One half-hour television commercial I participated in featured President Kennedy's science adviser, Jerome Wiesner, who became dean of science at MIT., an admiral who had been head of the CIA, Professor George Kistiakowsky of Harvard, and about five other people. We sat around a table denouncing Goldwater for his rash belligerence and pointing with pride to Lyndon Johnson, whom we called a statesman for promising not to get us further involved in the war in Vietnam. We were told that Lyndon Johnson loved this television commercial so much, with all these distinguished people calling him a statesman, that he had it shown several times at the White House.

Within a couple of days after his successful election Johnson himself called me up at Western Reserve Medical School to thank me for my help in electing him president. He added, "I hope I will prove worthy of your trust," and I said, "Oh, President Johnson, of course you will!" It never occurred to me that he would betray our trust so badly and so swiftly.

It was only three months later, in February 1965, that he abruptly turned our Vietnam involvement into full-scale war: he began the bombing of North Vietnam and the buildup of fighting troops that eventually reached a half-million, of whom 57, 000 died. I was afraid that it would lead to World War III at any time. The Soviet Union and China both threatened to come into the war - the Soviet Union if we mined Haiphong Harbor, and China if we bombed Hanoi.

I wrote Johnson several indignant letters. I got replies from McGeorge Bundy, Johnson's national-security adviser. Bundy was a very condescending correspondent, and his letters took the following tone: "My dear Doctor, you may be assured that we have considered the point of view that you express, and we feel that it has no validity whatsoever."

Next I sent a letter via one of the president's assistants, asking him to put it on Johnson's desk. In this letter I told Johnson that he was utterly wrong from every point of view. That Vietnam was one country, not two: That he was wrong to think he could win when the French had so ignominiously failed. That our reactionary puppet Diem was hated. That the war violated the Constitution, which says that only Congress can declare war. That the American people would turn against the war and bring the Republican Party back into power. There were ten points in all. This time Johnson himself replied, but he took up just one point: where I had accused him, too broadly, of going totally against his promise not to send Americans to fight in an Asian war. (He brought up the Tonkin Gulf Resolution in which he had threatened retaliation.) He ended his letter by saying, "I hope that I may have your support in the future." That unleashed another long letter from me, in which I told him rather rudely, why he couldn't expect my support.

At this time, I was still enough in the good graces of the administration to be invited to take part in the White House Conference on International Cooperation. I watched Johnson carefully when he shook hands with me, he didn't change his facial expression one bit. At the climax of his speech at that conference, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, revealed what I thought was the fatuousness of our policy toward Vietnam, China and the U.S.S.R. by leaning forward toward the two thousand guests from all over the world, and twice intoning, "Communist nations have appetite! Communist nations have appetite!" It sounded like a scout master telling a ghost story at the campfire. It was the U.S. that had gone half way around the world to try to control Southeast Asia.

I wrote to Jerome Wiesner after Johnson's escalation, suggesting that we get as many of those panelists as possible, most of whom we knew were opposed to what Johnson was doing, to write a group letter to him. I thought it would impress Johnson that the people who had supported him now thought that he was going haywire in Vietnam. Wiesner felt it was all right for us to protest as individuals but not to make this statement as a group. I still think it was worth doing. But I didn't have enough self - assurance to go ahead and collect other people's signatures.

I don't think that I had any special power when it came to changing minds. Young people simply didn't want to be sent to Vietnam to kill and be killed in a war that they considered all wrong. It was young people who carried the main burden of opposition to the war, overwhelmingly so at demonstrations. But they still wanted the backing of older people at rallies and in talks, and that's where I came in. I was a responsible professional person and was vehemently opposed to the war on a military, moral, and constitutional basis.

This made me a popular speaker. My schedule for a number of years was every other month on the road. I spoke six days a week, sometimes seven, at a different university every day. Often there was a press conference at the airport and interviews on television, in the afternoon. Toward the end of the afternoon I was usually asked to make myself available in the student lounge for informal discussions. Then I'd have dinner with the students. Usually I'd give the talk from eight to nine and answer questions from nine to ten, and then they would announce to those who had additional questions that I would be available in the student lounge. About eleven my handlers would say, "Now we're going to Professor Jenkins's house, where we can really relax." They could relax, because their job of arranging everything had been accomplished, but for me it was the hardest session of all. Here students would ask me fundamental questions like "Do you think I should go to Canada, or do you think I should go to jail-questions that my psychological training told me I shouldn't even try to answer. If a person can't make up his own mind about such crucial matters of conscience, somebody else whom he trusts would only get him more mixed up by telling him what to do. Such students I would simply draw out more in a conversation, crumpled up on the couch at Professor Jenkins's house and sweating like a horse at this stage. Finally at midnight I would say to my student handlers, "I've got to get to the motel and sleep because I'm getting up at six to catch the first plane out."

One of the things that preoccupied me on the road was how to keep my clothes looking neat. I always carried an extra suit and managed to jam in four or five shirts, eight or ten detachable collars, shorts, and maybe an extra pair of shoes all in a carry-on bag. Back at the motel I would try to take the worst wrinkles out of my suit by pressing a hot wet washcloth against the elbow and knee wrinkles and, if possible, hang the suit up high to dry on the chandelier or curtain rod.

In my speeches I ended up trying to give people a sense of their own power. I would try to persuade those who were only half-persuaded that it's right to protest a war like that. I began by telling them how I was born and raised a Republican, that my father was a Republican who revered Coolidge and that in my first election, in 1924, I just assumed his political views were right, and voted a straight Republican ticket. My audiences were composed mostly of liberal students and faculty, so the idea that I had started as an unthinking Republican amused them and kept them from dismissing me as a cranky radical from birth. It showed them that it's possible to change.

Then I'd explain the history of our involvement in Vietnam - the thing they had come to hear. I went back to France's colonialization of Indochina in the nineteenth century, the Japanese occupation in World War II, and the resistance that Ho Chi Minh led against the Japanese and later the French. The Vietnamese defeated the French at Dien Bien Phu. The peace treaty, called the Geneva Accords, specified that Vietnam would be divided into North and South for just two years, to allow the French to settle their affairs. Then the country was to be reunited and national elections held--no more foreign intervention. The U.S, promised at Geneva to abide by these terms. Even President Eisenhower admitted that Ho Chi Minh would win the election by eighty percent. But then, breaking our government's promise, the Catholic archbishop of New York, Joe Kennedy, father of John, and Secretary of State Dulles got together and had the U.S. install its first puppet government in the South, under Diem. Later John Kennedy kept it in power by sending twenty thousand so-called military advisers.

I explained how I supported Lyndon Johnson on television and radio in 1964 because he promised not to send Americans to fight in an Asian war, and how he betrayed us. I told them how the FBI had lied about me, how they didn't understand American democracy and really thought it was their business to be suspicious of anybody who didn't agree politically with J. Edgar Hoover. An FBI man was always visible in the middle of the audience, in his slouch hat and his camel hair coat. At one peace rally when everybody was asked to get up and hold hands in a circle and sing, the two FBI agents were left sitting in the middle, sticking out like sore thumbs.

Then I would go on to the question "Does anything do any good?" and gave them my strenuous belief that any actions do do good. I'd point out that opposition to the war was growing. When Lyndon Johnson declined to run again, I made the most of it: the most powerful man in the twentieth century had proved incapable of stemming the tide.

I always got a standing ovation when I finished, and that gave me encouragement to keep going. . . ."

Source: Spock, M.D., Benjamin and Mary Morgan. Spock On Spock. New York: Pantheon, 1989. pp. 174 - 183.