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LYNDON JOHNSON AND FOREIGN POLICY: THE CASE OF WESTERN EUROPEAND THE SOVIET UNION

Francis M. Bator

Francis Bator served from 1964-67 first as a senior member of theNSC staff and then as deputy national security advisor to PresidentJohnson, with responsibility for U.S.-European relations and foreigneconomic policy. In a 1967 article entitled "Europe's Assistant,"The Economist wrote that "On most of these matters most of the time,a thread of lucidity, consistency and balance has been traceable inthe Administration's handling and Mr. Bator has had a lot to do withit." A distinguished economist at Harvard's Kennedy School ofGovernment, Bator's 1960 book, The Question of Government Spending,was identified in The New York Times as one of the seven books thatinfluenced John F. Kennedy's approach to the presidency. Bator'spresentation to the Institute of Politics offers a mostunconventional firsthand description of how President Johnson wentabout making foreign policy decisions.

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During 1964-67, I was able to observe at first hand - sometimes day byDay - Lyndon Johnson's management of American policy toward bothWestern Europe and the Soviet Union, and also foreign economicpolicy. This is not the place for a detailed history, but I willbriefly describe how the Johnson administration dealt with thecircumstances the United States was faced with in Europe during1964-68, and with what result. Then I will speak about Johnson's rolein shaping the administration's response and about his approach tothis set of problems, his mindset and style as it were.

To give an idea of where I am headed, I'll paraphrase McGeorgeBundy's description of Johnson as a very "majority leader"-likemanager of foreign policy. But a caution is needed. Some historiansbelieve that the description characterizes Johnson's relations withhis Cabinet officers and staff. Not so. As you will see, he regularlyoverruled the lot whenever he thought we were mistaken aboutsomething that mattered. But I think he did think of his oppositenumbers-Wilson, Erhard, Kiesinger, even de Gaulle, and to a degreeeven Kosygin and Brezhnev-the way he had thought as Senate leader aboutDirksen and Long and Mills. He was willing to be, andwas, attentive to their problems, but he also expected them to beattentive to his. In our alliance relations, as in relations withMoscow, I think this approach worked remarkably well. But I amgetting ahead of myself.

Because it is the story I know best, I will stick mainly withJohnson and Europe, and some international economics. At the end I'llalso say something about Vietnam. For now, suffice it that, in myview, his handling of Vietnam reveals next to nothing about hismanagement of non-Vietnam foreign policy. The reason is simple. Inthe spring of 1965 I believe Johnson was confronted by anexcruciating and inescapably lonely binary choice: break theEisenhower-Kennedy-Johnson promise not to transform the Vietnam Warinto an American war, or break the Eisenhower-Kennedy-Johnson promiseto preserve an independent South Vietnam-either, or. There was Ithink no other choice. I wish-certainly in retrospect-that he had

Copyright: F Bator 2001 F.

chosen to back away. But had he done so, and whatever the effect onU.S. credibility abroad (easily remediable in my opinion), I believe,as I think he believed, that the resulting political firestorm ("wholost Indochina?") would have wrecked his domestic program: civilrights, poverty, health care, education. Very likely, it would alsohave destroyed domestic support for his attempt to "thaw the ColdWar," the policy that made possible the Nonproliferation Treaty,helped encourage the Federal Republic's shift from a rigid"reunification or nothing" stance to Brandt's Ostpolitik, led to theJohnson-Kosygin summit in Glassboro, and, had it not been for theSoviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, might well have stopped ABM soonerand MIRVs altogether.

I. ON EUROPEAN POLICY AND INTERNATIONAL ECONOMICS

For a reasoned judgment about the Johnson administration'sEuropean policy, one has to begin with what was not movable, thecircumstances that American policy could not change. I have in mindtwo constraints in particular:

* For the defining problem of the Cold War - the division of Europe,Germany and Berlin, and de facto Soviet occupation of East-CentralEurope - there was no solution in sight, Vietnam or no Vietnam. Anyarrangement that Germans and other West Europeans would haveconsidered safe would have been rejected out of hand by apost-Khrushchev Politburo that was both muscle-bound and risk-averse.

* As long as General de Gaulle remained in the Elysée, nosignificant progress toward the integration of Western Europe was inthe cards.

With structural change in both directions blocked, there existed,for the near term, no practically attainable vision of the Europeanfuture to focus Western Europe's political energies. For Atlanticpolitics, there remained the business of sorting out and resolvingthe many secondary differences that inevitably arose amongdifferentially situated welfare democracies-secondary because we allshared a first-order interest in assuring collective security andavoiding jungle economics. From a different perspective, the taskconsisted of making work, and improving, the processes andinstitutions that had been put in place for advancing sharedinterests and resolving conflict. Inescapably, it often fell to theU.S. to take the lead. The hard part was to work out solutions thatwould not overload the politics of any major country, including ourown-in other words, to avoid creating so much resentment thatconstructive problem-solving would become impossible, and/orstrengthening extremist politicians who questioned the underlyingAtlantic relationship.

The second general task was to try to "thaw the Cold War." Thatmeant doing what we could to minimize the risk inherent in themilitary confrontation while insuring against a reversion to anaggressively expansionist Soviet policy (e.g., relative to Berlin),and, at the same time, encouraging the painfully slow andintermittent processes of internal easing in the communist countriesthat might eventually lead to more fundamental political change.


Problems and Opportunities

There was no shortage of problems during 1964-68, or of opportunities:

1. General de Gaulle, committed to his own special vision ofFrance's place in the world, and determined, after aconfidence-shattering hundred years, to revive national self-respect,believed that it was neither safe nor dignified for France or Europeto depend mainly on the United States for its security. He wasdetermined to end French participation in NATO, the organization, andto rid France of all foreign troops and military facilities(including NATO headquarters), but without losing the protectionafforded by the American nuclear umbrella. A state-of-the-art and strictlyindependent national nuclear force, a bilateral Paris-Moscow dialogueconcerning the future of Europe, the exclusion of Britain from the EEC (atleast so long as London did not turn its back on the Americans), replacementof the dollar by gold as the preferred form of central bankreserves-these were just the larger items on the General's agenda.

2. West Germany, which virtually all agreed should remainnon-nuclear, facing a powerful, nuclear-equipped Warsaw Pact armysome 150 miles inside Germany and astride Berlin, was uneasily butinescapably dependent for its ultimate security on the Americannuclear force. With American cities vulnerable to a Soviet secondstrike, the credibility of that force as a counter to a Soviet threat(arising, say, from disturbances in East Germany, perhaps inconnection with Berlin), was seen to depend almost entirely on the"tripwire" role played by a large American army on the ground inGermany. It is not surprising, therefore, that any signal out ofWashington that could be read to foreshadow a withdrawal of sizeablenumbers of American troops would give rise to intense anxiety in Bonn.

In 1965-66, there were many such signals. Majority Leader Mansfieldhad introduced a resolution in the Senate calling for a massivereduction in American combat formations stationed in Europe. In hisquiet but effective way, President Eisenhower let it be known fromhis farm in Gettysburg that he favored a large cut, arguing that weshould rely mainly on a nuclear response, and even hinting thatperhaps the time had come for Germany to play a nuclear role! Thecontinuing deterioration in the U.S. balance of payments-a result ofan economic boom at home and an increasingly overvalued dollar- gaveadded weight to the argument that a newly rich Europe was perfectlycapable of defending itself. A confrontation became unavoidable inJuly '66, when Chancellor Erhard, in political trouble at home, wrotePresident Johnson that severe budget difficulties would forceBonn-with its large payments surplus and associated propensity tolecture the U.S. about living in balance-of-payments sin-to renege onits agreement to purchase American-made weapons in amounts sufficientto "offset" the foreign exchange costs incurred to support U.S.forces in Germany. A similar problem had arisen between Bonn andLondon in relation to the British Army on the Rhine.

3. The nagging problem of German involvement in nuclear coordinationwithin the alliance further heightened insecurity in Bonn. Any scheme thatcould conceivably be represented as possibly, even just possibly, leadingto a "German finger on the trigger" would haveproduced semi-paranoiac hysteria - and not just in Moscow.


A whole series of plans for some kind of jointly owned force (MLF,ANF, etc.) had been devised, mostly in Washington, to give Bonn afeeling of participation without giving it any real control. Nonearoused much enthusiasm outside of Washington and Bonn, and eventhere they were controversial. By 1966, after Johnson had decided ineffect to jettison the MLF by declaring his willingness to agree onlyon a plan favored by the European principals (in full knowledge thatno agreement was possible), all that remained was an American promisenot to foreclose the possibility, however remote, of future Germanparticipation in some kind of European nuclear force. The trouble wasthat foreclosing that possibility appeared to be both necessary, andperhaps by then sufficient, to persuade the Soviets to join in atreaty to stop the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Securingagreement on a nonproliferation treaty was a central part of LBJ'sattempt-in response to the second major task outlined above-to thawthe Cold War. The issue intersected the politics in Germany ofshifting from having no truck whatever with the communist countries,especially East Germany, to an ameliorative Ostpolitik that wouldcomplement the American policy of East-West "bridge building."

4. In London, where the political class was unsettled aboutBritain's role in the world and chronically ambivalent about Europe(an ambivalence reinforced by the humiliation of having beenblackballed by de Gaulle), a new Labor government under Harold Wilsonwas desperately trying to set the economy aright. With too manycompeting claims for inadequate resources, union-fuelled cost-pushinflation a continuing threat, and an overvalued currency subject tofrequent speculative attack, Wilson and his colleagues were underpressure to reduce defense commitments in Germany and get rid of thementirely "East of Suez." The outcome of the Wilson government'sdefense review would significantly affect the choices open toWashington. A large British withdrawal from Germany, for example, would havemade it much harder for the administration to defeatSenator Mansfield's resolution calling for the withdrawal of Americantroops.

The fate of sterling mattered too. Devaluation could, in thecircumstances of the time, start a chain reaction of competitivedevaluations that might lead to an even more overvalued dollar and/ora run on the U.S. gold stock. This might or might not complicate thepolitics of repairing the structural flaws in the internationalmonetary system (see below). It would certainly complicate theconflicts within NATO over burden sharing with respect to defense.Most likely, competitive devaluations would wreck what was called theKennedy Round, a major ongoing negotiation aimed at cutting tariffsacross the board worldwide.

5. Even with no major exchange-rate crisis, the Kennedy Round wasdeadlocked by early 1964. Failure would have risked a return to akind of dog-eat-dog economics that would have very likely poisonedpolitical relations as well, especially between the United States andthe members of the European Economic Community (EEC). Agriculturaltrade was the major sticking point. It was the American position,reinforced by the pledges of three American presidents, that, incontrast to the previous Dillon Round, a significant liberalizationof trade in farm goods must be a part of the bargain. For that,France and Germany would have to agree significantly to revise the


EEC's "common agricultural policy," an elaborate protectionist dealthat was generally seen as an essential ingredient of the glueholding the Community together. Neither government was willing tosupport any such revision. It was reasonable to think that General deGaulle would have been quite happy to see the negotiations fail. AndBonn, already at cross purposes with Paris because of its dependencefor security on NATO and the U.S., and feeling pressure from the U.S.to oppose France on the gold issue, was certainly not prepared tocross Paris, or for that matter its own farmers, on agriculturaltrade as well.

6. Last, there was the intertwined problem of the U.S. paymentsdeficit, and the international monetary system. Though inescapablytechnical, suffice it here to assert the following: 1

a. Without a large reduction in the exchange value of the dollar interms of the currencies of the major surplus countries- or (and?)short of a major change in American foreign policy (which, whethergood or bad in itself, would have been a wholly disproportionateresponse to this problem)-there existed no set of policy actions toeliminate the U.S. deficit that wouldn't have wrecked the Kennedy Roundand severely damaged the world trading system, vastly complicatedthe attempt to sort out the issues of burden sharing in defense, killedany chance for a collaborative reform of the international money system,and, in general, made constructive, intra-alliance problem-solving unworkable.Even more important from a domestic perspective, trying to fix the deficitprimarily by means of macroeconomic measures without a much cheaperdollar would have required driving the U.S. economy into a severerecession. Merely restoring internal balance- desirable in its ownterms-would not have sufficed to restore external balance. Overall,it was a classic instance of the available medicines being worse thanthe disease.

b. Without a precipitating (and damaging) crisis, the major surpluscountries would not have sat still for a substantial one-time dollardevaluation, whether quietly negotiated over a weekend, or achievedby means of a large one-time increase in the price of gold. During1964-67, the U.S. was still running a large trade and current accountsurplus; it simply wasn't large enough to offset very large netcapital exports, i.e., purchases by Americans of foreign plant andequipment, and foreign securities. (There was some truth to theGaullist charge that the Americans were using short-term moneyborrowed from Europe to buy up Europe.) In any case, the economic andpolitical advantages afforded by an undervaluedcurrency - export-led growth and a large payments surplus (widelythought of as a measure of virtue) - were too appealing for the nationsenjoying surpluses to give up voluntarily.

c. The Bretton Woods rules then in force were likely to give rise toserious worldwide economic trouble irrespective of whether theU.S. international accounts were in deficit, surplus or in balance(however defined). Fixed exchange rates were the norm, anddevaluation of a major currency-an economic gamble in any event-waswidely considered a mark of political failure, and, in the case ofthe dollar, was probably unacceptable to the others. With reservesconsisting largely of gold, dollars, and sterling, and gold the onlyexternal source of net new reserves for the world as a whole, and


with the U.S. required to keep the dollar convertible into gold atsome fixed price, there did not exist any gold price, nor anyconfiguration of U.S. payments, that would save the rules from causingserious trouble, even aside from the problems thatwould be posed by the rapid prospective increase in capital mobility.The system was becoming unworkable, but it was not yet perceived tobe so dysfunctional by key finance ministers and their politicalsuperiors as to require fundamental overhaul, together with theassociated risks of disruption. Meanwhile, troubles were building.

Results

* During 1964-68, the Johnson administration led the way inresponding to the French partial defection in ways that preserved themilitary and political strength of NATO. All facilities and foreignforces were removed from France-a costly, elaborate business. A hostof knotty secondary problems: over-flight rights, use of an oilpipeline, and the like, were settled. By scrupulously avoiding anypublic quarrel with Paris or any suggestion that France had forfeitedher right to protection under Article V of the treaty, while makingit clear that she would be welcome to rejoin any time she chose-andby encouraging the other European members, notably West Germany, towork out specific problems of great local sensitivity (e.g., thefuture of the two French divisions stationed in Germany) according totheir own political needs-a major crisis in the alliance that couldeasily have divided the non-French members was resolved with minimumstrain.

* The administration initiated and pressed to conclusion the socalled Trilateral Negotiations of 1966-67, which ended in agreementamong the FRG, the U.K. and the U.S. on their respectivecontributions to the NATO order of battle, the American and Britishforces to be stationed in Germany, and the sharing of the budgetaryand foreign exchange costs involved. All of these agreements werebased upon a joint assessment of the military threat, a considerablefeat in itself. The agreements, and the process which produced them,were designed to assure Bonn and the other European allies of thedurability of the U.S. commitment, while taking into account Bonn'sand London's budget problems, and the British and American foreignexchange problems. Obviously, no such agreement could permanentlyassuage German anxieties or neutralize Congressional complaints aboutour having to defend "rich, ungrateful Europeans" but, following someearly contretemps (about which more later), the process avoided whatmight easily have become a second major crisis, and produced aworkable equilibrium at least for the time being.

* The administration took the lead in creating the NATO NuclearPlanning Group, with the Federal Republic a full-fledged member. Thatmade it much easier for Bonn to go along with language in the draftof the Nonproliferation Treaty that ruled out the option of a jointEuropean nuclear force that would include the FRG. This in turnopened the way for agreement among all but a few holdouts on theNonproliferation Treaty which was initialed in August, l967.

* By sensibly jettisoning agricultural demands vis-à-vis the EECthat would have wrecked the negotiations-France and Germany eachpossessed a de facto veto, and France would have used it; so probably


would Germany-the administration succeeded in reviving the KennedyRound and bringing it to a successful conclusion. It resulted in themost extensive reduction of industrial tariffs in the thenthirty-year history of the American effort to liberalize world trade.

* The administration initiated and, by managing to isolate abitterly opposed France, brought to successful completion anegotiation among the leading financial powers that provided for thecreation of a new kind of collaboratively managed international money("paper gold"). It was to serve as a new source of liquidity tosupplement (and eventually replace?) gold and dollars in the reservesof central banks. Short of moving to a system of flexible exchangerates at least among the major currencies, which was anathema to mostfinance ministers and central bankers of the time, and in any case ahighly risky leap in the dark, it was an essential and large step inthe direction of a workable successor monetary regime to BrettonWoods. (As it turned out, both this and the "two tier" arrangement inrelation to gold-see the bullet after next-came to lose some of theirimportance when Nixon and Connally formally cut the link to gold inAugust 1971, and soon thereafter elected to let the dollar float. Butin 1967 and 1968, both innovations were widely hailed, e.g., by noless an authority than Paul Samuelson in Newsweek. As explained inthe next bullet, the notion that all this would have been made eithereasy or unnecessary had the U.S. only eliminated its payments deficitis plain wrong.)

* By adopting a moderate, temporizing balance-of-payments policydesigned to contain but not eliminate the U.S. payments deficit, theadministration managed to hold off a gold/dollar crisis until all theabove negotiations had been concluded, while avoiding measures thatwould have eliminated the deficit but wrecked the negotiations assurely as an untimely gold crisis. The administration maintained theconstructive pretense that it would eliminate "the" payments deficit,while doing only enough in the way of relatively low-cost microeconomicactions, one-time cosmetic bookkeeping, and preventive persuasion to avoid animmediate dollar crisis, thus protecting the ongoing negotiations,while avoiding any actions that might endanger them directly or doother lasting economic or foreign policy damage. The point of all thetalk about fixing the deficit was to position the U.S. politically inrelation to the financial markets, the media, the Congress, andforeign governments and central banks in such a way as to calmnervous dollar holders, strengthen the American position in thenegotiations, and give a gradual, collaborative process of reformwhatever small chance it could have to succeed.

As is clear from the above, the strategy worked. During the springand summer of 1967 the administration completed the TrilateralNegotiations, the Kennedy Round, the international monetarynegotiations (SDR), and the Nonproliferation Treaty. The Britishmanaged to delay devaluation until November. Washington held off agold crisis until the following March. When it finally did occur, theadministration secured the agreement of the other major financialpowers to stop buying or selling gold in the outside market, thusallowing the price of all the gold not already in vaults of centralbanks to fluctuate freely. This was a long step toward demonetizinggold, and was thought to be an important second step in constructinga serviceable successor regime to Bretton Woods.1


* While all this was going on, the administration launched its policy of"bridge building" vis-à-vis the Soviet Union and the rest of EasternEurope. Besides the Nonproliferation Treaty and a number of secondarymeasures designed to increase communication between the U.S. and theEuropean communist countries, that policy gave strong backing to theshift in West German policy from trying to isolate East Germany (theHallstein Doctrine) to an ameliorative Ostpolitik. It led to aserious face-to-face conversation between Johnson and Kosygin,notably about the arms race, at the Glassboro Summit. Had it not beenfor Moscow's panicky and brutal over-reaction to subsequent events inCzechoslovakia (the "Prague Spring"), it would have led to a fullsummit in Leningrad - the first since the ill-fated Vienna summit - with ABMand MIRVs on the agenda.

* In his comprehensive October 1966 speech on American policy towardEurope, Johnson set forth the intellectual framework for all theabove - the set of principles that underlay U.S. policy toward bothWestern Europe and the Soviet Union and the other European communistcountries. It offered a rationale for a two-pronged policy designedto enhance military security, political collaboration, and economicwell-being in the West, and to promote an East-West environment of mutualtrust that would maximize the chance of gradual internal political easingin the East. The latter, the President stated in the speech, was aprecondition for achieving the ultimate goal, the ending of theSoviet occupation of East-Central Europe and, thus, of the unnaturaldivision of Europe. (The proposition that significant internalpolitical change in the Soviet Union was a necessary precondition ofGerman unification, and that such internal change would be at leastmarginally furthered by an American policy of "bridge building," wasa departure in declared U.S. policy. It reflected a strongly heldJohnson conviction. For a brief history of the writing of the speech,see endnote 2.)

II. LBJ'S ROLE

What was President Johnson's personal contribution to all this? Ibelieve that disinterested historians will discover that LBJ'sjudgment about American priorities: what mattered and how much; hisnegotiator's intuition about what was and was not likely to bebargainable-the attainable tradeoffs as it were; and, not least, hissense of process and timing, played a decisive role in producing theresults I have just recounted. So did his confidence in his ownassessments, after listening to the arguments, and his willingness tooverrule even his most senior advisors when, as often occurred, hethought they were mistaken. These strengths were on full display inthe NATO/France crisis; in dealing with Bonn and London on forcelevels and burden sharing, with London about sterling, and Bonn aboutnuclear arrangements; in the negotiations that produced theNonproliferation Treaty and the Kennedy Round (his personal attentiongot down to the tariff on canned hams); and in what to do and not todo about the U.S. payments deficit, international monetary reform andgold. And it was so in every "bridge building" initiative vis-à-visthe Soviet Union, and in deciding on what to say and how to say it inhis major speech on U.S. policy in Europe.


It is not, I think, all that surprising that someone like Johnson,who had comparatively little interest in and knowledge of thesubstance of foreign affairs but was a master of politics and ofpower and had been enormously successful as Senate Majority Leader,would be both shrewd and wise in coping with the cluster ofoverlapping, interconnected problems we faced in Europe. Indeed,often wiser and shrewder than an array of extraordinarilydistinguished and senior diplomatic, military and financial advisorswho were however not politicians by trade or temperament-and I thinkthis is critical-many of whom had operational responsibilitiesconfined to this or that part of the set of issues on the table. Twostories exemplify the point, and illustrate the processes of adviceand decision on these matters, and how LBJ worked.

NATO/France

General de Gaulle's decision to pull France out of NATO, theorganization, while insisting that she would remain party to thetreaty, divided the top leadership of the U.S. government. ThePresident's most senior foreign policy advisors-Secretary of StateRusk and Under Secretary Ball (who was State's point man on Europeanpolicy), backed up by former Secretary Dean Acheson and John McCloy,both of whom became actively involved as consultants (Acheson fulltime)-insisted that France must not be allowed to get away withhaving it both ways. They did not expect that de Gaulle would changehis mind. But to keep the alliance from gradually falling apart, theyfelt it was essential to impress on the other allies and the Frenchelectorate that there was a price to be paid for what they thoughtwas irresponsible, destructive behavior. In short, they wanted tomake an example of France. To this end, they stimulated a crasheffort within the bureaucracy to inventory all the ways the U.S.could do injury to French interests.

The President did not disagree in principle. He too thought theGeneral an infernal nuisance, and considered his performancedamaging. But he didn't think there was anything the U.S. could dothat would prevent France from "getting away with it," at leastnothing that wouldn't damage the alliance even more. One needed onlyto look at a map to realize that the threat of reading France out ofthe alliance was nonsense-there was no way to defend West Germanyfrom an attack by the Warsaw Pact without also defending France.Trying to get rid of de Gaulle by persuading French voters that hewas endangering their security struck LBJ as a pipe dream. They hadjust reelected him for seven years, and the threat of a Soviet armydescending on Paris from the North German plain was pretty remote.Certainly on de Gaulle's main thrust-the demand that all foreigntroops and facilities be moved out of France-the U.S. had noeffective cards to play.

Because the relocation would be expensive and would raise manydivisive issues among the non-French members of the alliance, whatreally mattered, the President thought, was that it be very clear tothe other allies that Paris was to blame, not Washington. He feltthat getting into a nasty public argument with de Gaulle would onlyblur the question of responsibility, the more so because for many ofthe other allies, especially the Germans and the other EEC members,maintaining good relations with France was of enormous practical and


political importance. And the U.S. needed their support, especiallythat of the FRG-often standing against the French-on trade, monetaryreform, and other fronts. Last, we needed French cooperation on suchimportant practical issues as access to the oil pipeline andover-flight rights.

LBJ instinctively understood all this almost instantly. No one had asurer grasp in a bargaining situation of who held what cards, of whatwas and was not attainable, of the opportunity cost of getting alittle more here as measured by the consequences there. Bearing inmind the direct and indirect effects on all the issues that mattered,whether they were currently on or off the table, was second naturefor him. And he was irritated that many of his foreign policy expertsdidn't seem to be able to figure it out, or, indeed, to pay muchattention to what it was that he wanted. In part this was his ownfault. Rather than spelling out his reasoning in detail - which herarely did - he resorted to a characteristic one-sentence parable:"When a man doesn't want you in his house, you take your hat andcoat, bid him goodbye, and quietly leave."

Applying this philosophy, Johnson repeatedly turned down his topforeign policy advisors' patently anti-French proposals on how toproceed, their drafts of negotiating instructions and aide-memoires,and their suggestions of what to say and not say to the press, andjust as often approved alternatives provided by his staff. And whenBall, Acheson, et al.-a formidable crew- kept behaving as though theydid not get the message, LBJ told Scotty Reston, who promptlyreported his views in The New York Times. It was a rough spring,the more so because the seniors assumed that the President was beingput up to all this by his staff. There was just a bit of "who is thisTexan pol to tell us about high diplomacy?" in the air. FollowingMcGeorge Bundy's departure at the end of February, 1966-he left a fewdays before the arrival of General de Gaulle's letter announcingFrance's partial withdrawal from NATO-there was also a palpabledetermination to be free of "meddling" by White House staff. (As ithappens, I learned about the Reston column at the same time they did, thatSunday morning, and remember thinking that it wasn't going to be helpful.)

One incident, especially, sticks in my mind. Perhaps the mostsensitive single NATO issue concerned the two French divisions onGerman soil. Once those divisions were no longer committed to NATOuse in an emergency, the old Occupation Statutes provided the onlylegal justification for their continued presence in Germany.Remember, de Gaulle was telling the world that foreign troops onFrench soil violated French sovereignty. It didn't take long beforenationalist Germans started asking "What about those French troops onGerman soil?" What should we advise Bonn to do?

The instructions Ball et al. drew up for McCloy to carry to Bonn asSpecial Envoy called for him to tell Chancellor Erhard that in theU.S. view, it was essential that Bonn take a very hard line withParis. The instructions contained a lot of technical detail, but thebasic message was clear: the Germans should insist that either thosedivisions remain committed to NATO use in an emergency, or they haveto leave Germany. In other words, unless de Gaulle agreed flatly toreverse himself, the German government must in effect expel thoseFrench divisions.


The President was on vacation at his Texas ranch. State wired a copyof the proposed instructions for his information-x pages of hard toread, single-spaced text-on Sunday, two days before McCloy'sdeparture for Bonn. When the issue was brought to LBJ's attention bya warning telegram to the effect that it might be better to letErhard decide how he wanted to deal with what was bound to become inGerman politics a very hot potato-that if the U.S. took the "lead ininsisting on stringent conditions, many Germans and other Europeanswill feel that a Europe-splitting choice was forced on Germany byus"- the President ordered the Secretary of State to change McCloy'sorders midstream. (Franco-German rapprochement was a cornerstone ofGerman foreign policy, made so by Erhard's revered predecessor KonradAdenauer, whose doubts about Erhard's fitness to govern were widelyknown.)

The President, resenting the interruption of his vacation, didn'tfocus on the issue until Thursday, by which time McCloy was alreadyin Bonn. On the way to Mexico on Air Force One, LBJ handed Rusk thewarning cable, said he agreed with it and told him to change McCloy'sinstructions. Walt Rostow, who was on the plane with them, told methe story on Monday morning, after I was relieved to discover fromthe cabled report of the McCloy-Erhard conversation that the ordersmust have been changed. LBJ's rather harsh way of dealing with thisissue reveals, as did the Reston incident, that he didn't take kindlyto State's blatant attempt to do an end run.

LBJ ordered McCloy, in effect, to say to Erhard that the question ofwhat line to take on the French divisions was for him, Erhard, todecide according to what would work best for him, and that whateverhe decided, the U.S. would back him. As it turned out, though Erhardtalked a brave game in his conversation with McCloy, probably in partto show off to his outspokenly anti-Gaullist foreign minister GerhardSchroeder, when it actually came to facing de Gaulle, he backed downcompletely. Had the U.S. taken the original Ball/Acheson/McCloyposition, we would have been left out on a limb, looking ridiculousin insisting that Erhard pick a fight with de Gaulle on an issue ofonly trivial significance for us but enormous political significancefor Erhard.

Notice, once again, Johnson the majority leader-you don't put a lotof pressure on a powerful senior colleague in connection with anissue that is of little consequence for you but of enormousconsequence for him. The point is especially apt, of course, when youneed his support on a host of other issues.

Postscript. I recently learned from Professor Thomas Schwartz abouta March 15, 1967 letter from Dean Acheson to Anthony Eden, in whichAcheson wrote: "I have been sadly wondering what LBJ might have doneif he had persevered in the plans which McCloy and I had started toget the French troops out of Germany a year ago. This would have beenclear notice to France and the French Army that de Gaulle's attack onNATO has failed. He would clearly have lost this last week'selection. But irresolution and feeble councils prevailed and he hassqueaked thru again." The fact is that Lyndon Johnson thought thatour trying to make use of Erhard's Germany as a weapon with which todefeat de Gaulle would damage our relations with the Germans and the


other Europeans, endanger NATO, and fail to get rid of de Gaulle.

Troops and Money

The money spent on German goods and services by American forcesstationed in Germany represented a significant negative item in ourailing balance of payments. To "offset" that, the Germans had agreedto purchase weapons made in the U.S. in amounts sufficient toneutralize the drain. But, facing budget deficits, the ErhardGovernment wanted to renegotiate that agreement, as well as a similaragreement with the U.K. By the time Chancellor Erhard wrote thePresident in early July '66 asking both for this relief, and that wenot connect the question of money with how large an American armyshould be stationed in Germany, negotiations on the subject betweenLondon and Bonn had stalled, and the British were about to go aheadwith large cuts in the British Army on the Rhine (BAOR). That couldhave started an unraveling process in NATO, in part by increasingdomestic pressure on us to follow suit. (In the same letter Erhardasked us to reconfirm that we would not exclude 'establishing in thefuture a joint integrated nuclear force' in order to buy a non-proliferation agreement.)

Erhard's request divided the top echelon of the U.S. government onceagain. Secretary of Defense McNamara, who had negotiated the offsetagreement, wanted to take a strong "no money/no troops" position. Hewas a balance of payments hawk more generally. (Once in an argumentabout that, he said that a gold crisis would be one of the two thingsthat could cause the President to lose the next election. I said yes,if it happened within three months of the election). He alsogenuinely thought that, on strict military grounds, a much smallerAmerican army would suffice. Last, he was concerned that, absentsufficient protection for our balance of payments, pressure from theSenate along the lines of the Mansfield Resolution might force aneven deeper troop cut than he thought safe. Treasury Secretary HenryFowler backed McNamara. Rusk, who never liked to confront McNamara,especially on an issue that he thought of as primarily aDefense/Treasury matter, had signed on in support of a draft reply toErhard that took the McNamara line. The draft said nothing about theU.K. offset and ignored Erhard's plea that we reconfirm our previousposition on the nuclear force/nonproliferation issue. The President,having been warned by his staff that the McNamara/Rusk draft raisedmajor questions, decided to send an interim reply saying that heneeded time to study the issues before replying in detail.

Things came to a head in early August when George McGhee, the U.S.Ambassador in Bonn, cabled that if we wanted to affect Germanbudgetary decisions we needed to act fast. Rusk and McNamara wereabout to leave town. The President, responding to a long staffmemorandum that spelled out the arguments and recommended, as analternative to the McNamara/ Fowler line, an invitation to Bonn andLondon that we jointly undertake a from-the-ground-up study thatwould sort out the issues of U.S., U.K. and German force deploymentsand burden-sharing in relation to the underlying strategic situation,decided to postpone decision until all his advisors were back in townand he could hear the arguments in person. (More specifically, hechecked "Wait" at the bottom of the staff memorandum in his "nightreading" pile, and wrote, "We will gamble on waiting. Draft letter


asking him to be ready to discuss in Sept. and to sit on budget." Onecould guess which way his mind was moving because he also checked the"Approve" box under the suggestion that "If, after having heard outMcNamara, you decide against a tough letter it is important to starta State-Defense-Treasury-White House exercise to prepare analternative strategy on offset and troop strength for use inU.S.-U.K.-FRG talks.")

All this was almost settled at a heated meeting two weeks later.McNamara, supported by Fowler, strongly pressed his case-we didn'tneed all those troops there, he insisted; the payments drain wasdangerous, the Germans had made a deal and we should hold them to it;we should tell the British that they must not cut, but that they haveto make their own money arrangements with the Germans. Ball, inrebuttal, was less effective than usual-absent a strong lead from areticent Rusk, he was at a disadvantage vis-à-vis McNamara, knew hehad over-reached with the President on NATO/France, and was in anycase about to leave the government. Nevertheless, the President choseto overrule McNamara and Fowler. Characteristically-and again intypical majority leader fashion-he decided to try to engage Erhardand Wilson in a process of "reasoning together." Specifically, hedecided to invite Bonn and London to join us in a tripartite processand aim at an outcome that would meet the German need both for somebudget relief and for reassurance that a U.S. army sufficient for aconventional defense in depth, and thus for deterrence, would remainin place; meet the British need for enough balance-of-paymentsprotection and budget relief to limit troop cuts so as to avoidgeneral NATO unraveling; and meet the American need for at least sometroop cuts and some balance-of-payments protection, enough of each toenable LBJ to hold off Senator Mansfield. He wrote Erhardaccordingly, letting it be known that he would designate John McCloy,who was respected and trusted in Bonn, to head the American team, andsent Ball and Deputy Defense Secretary Vance to London to persuadeHarold Wilson.

I say that LBJ almost settled it at this meeting. The argument inWashington had been mostly about whether we would insist, along thelines of the original McNamara-Rusk draft, that Bonn agree to a 100percent all-weapons offset arrangement following the expiration inJune '67 of the current agreement, failing which we would make verylarge reductions in U.S. forces stationed in Germany. In the heat ofthe argument during the meeting with the President about the preciselanguage of a reply-I was arguing with McNamara while trying tocompose an alternative-I made the mistake of suggesting that, besidestelling Erhard that we were prepared to throw open the whole issue offuture offsets, we could say, almost as an afterthought, that weassumed that the FRG would of course make good on the current year'sagreement. My assumption was that Erhard, having had his way on themain point, could always come back to us on that issue, and that wecould work something out before he visited LBJ in September. Thesuggestion was incorporated in the President's letter. ("I know thatyou and I are agreed that the current offset agreement will be fullymet and provided for in your new budget and legislative program.")

I turned out to be wrong in my assumption. Astonishingly, notrecognizing the implicit American concession concerning future offsetarrangements, the Chancellor rejected the idea of a trilateral


process. He cared about the American army, not the British, andseemed not to understand that there was a connection. And, despitecontrary advice from his people, he refused to make acounter-proposal concerning the current offset. He assumed that oncehe explained his situation face-to-face in September, LBJ would lethim off the hook. We used every available channel to Erhard,including his banker nephew, to tell him that it wouldn't work, andthat something must be worked out before the visit. Otherwise,confronted by a rapidly deteriorating payments situation andincreasing pressure from the Senate, the President would have to takea hard line on the matter because he couldn't be perceived to haveaccepted a very large payments hit just because his friend Erhardcried on his shoulder. But our entreaties were to no avail.

Predictably, the visit went badly. LBJ knew that it would if hewouldn't give way on the current offset issue, but he wouldn't budge.I couldn't figure out why until years later. Actually, if we hadshown some flexibility, we could have devised a procedure forsmoothing things over at least until after the visit, therebyavoiding a lot of media melodrama and depriving the commentators andhistorians of one of their stock non-Vietnam illustrations of LBJ'ssupposed incompetence in foreign affairs.

To be sure, to protect the trade and monetary negotiations, and tohold off Mansfield, it was important that we avoid a large currentbalance-of-payments shortfall, especially one attributable to the Germans,whose financial people were second only to the French in publiclyberating us about our payments imbalance (lectures that Mansfield andhis allies took great relish in calling to LBJ's attention.) But whatI believe was really behind the President's determination to standfast was his conviction-which was correct-that whatever concessionswe offered, Erhard was in no position to make good on his end of thebargain, that he was a political dead duck. No majority leader wastesvaluable chits to help a committee chairman who can't deliver.

At the end of the talks, the President took Erhard and hiscolleagues on a quick round-trip tour of the NASA base at CapeCanaveral: the launching pad with a rocket on top, the gigantic hanger,and the rest. During the flight back-we happened to be sitting next toeach other-Foreign Minister Schroeder said in a plaintive voice that hecouldn't understand why a country possessing the immense technological powerand wealth that it took to build such a fantastic facility would beatup on a small country like his for the sake of what to us must be apittance. I said something about how difficult it would be for thePresident to explain to people like Senator Mansfield his reasons forletting Bonn off the hook to the tune of several-hundred milliondollars, while continuing to maintain a large American army inGermany, at a time when the papers regularly carried stories aboutthe president of the Bundesbank and Schroeder's colleague in the WestGerman Finance Ministry complaining about our payments deficit andAmerican fiscal irresponsibility. Looking genuinely puzzled,Schroeder said 'Oh, I know nothing about that-it has nothing to dowith me.'

In any event, given the circumstances, including the fact that wehad proposed an orderly procedure for dealing with the entire rangeof relevant issues, I now think that LBJ's instincts were right. I


only wish he had bothered to explain what he had in mind. Butexplaining his reasons to staff-especially when he thought thempretty obvious-was not in his nature. He expected one to figure itout on one's own, and if one paid close attention he usually providedenough leads to make that possible. One learned to be a pretty goodpredictor of where he would come out on issues, and why. Given allthe other issues on which we needed German and U.K. support oracquiescence, for example, I was almost certain that the Presidentwould overrule McNamara and Fowler on the big troops/money question,and, in majority leader fashion, opt for a process designed toproduce an outcome that would work not just in Washington but also inBonn and London. That is exactly what he did.

Postscript. Having set in train a process aimed at producing acompromise that worked all around, and then designated as his leadnegotiator someone, in McCloy, known to be unshakably committed to astrong NATO and a close, confident German-American relationship, aswell as someone who would be certain to oppose any American troopcuts, LBJ-once again, predictably-kept tight control of U.S.negotiating strategy. He refused to show his own cards, even toMcCloy, until Bonn and London had played theirs. He demonstrated hiswillingness to be attentive to their concerns, but he was as tough asanyone in insisting that the outcome also accommodate his. Because ofMansfield, because there were no serious countervailingorder-of-battle considerations, and because, to protect the trade andinternational money negotiations, we needed to keep up the pretensethat we were determined to fix our payments deficit, he insisted oncutting one division - McNamara had pushed hard for cutting two.At the same time, he agreed to a scheme of rotation and equipmentpre-placement that would permit rapid build-up during an emergency.

On the money side, we settled on a much more flexible offsetarrangement that gave the Germans the option of buying, instead ofweapons, either other American-made goods or U.S. Treasury paper, thepurchase of which was largely an off-budget item. And, as part of thebargain, the Bundesbank agreed not to convert dollar holdings intogold. Last, we threw enough into the pot in the form of Americandefense purchases in the U.K. to make it possible for Wilson to limitreductions in the BAOR. Most important, it was all worked out in acollaborative tripartite process, on the basis of an elaborate jointassessment of the Warsaw Pact order of battle, how much warning timewe could count on, and the like.

Soon after the negotiations began, the Erhard government fell andwas replaced by a so called "grand coalition," headed by KurtKiesinger. A lot of commentators have blamed Erhard's fall on hisfailure to get LBJ to bend in September. I think they are mistaken.By September, Erhard was in very poor shape politically, and alsoinfirm physically, so much so that a senior member of his party, ErikBlumenfeld, whom I knew personally, made a point at the White Housestate dinner of privately apologizing for what had been apathetically inept performance by Erhard. He added something like "itwon't go on for long." (At the critical August meeting with thePresident, in arguing with McNamara, I had said something about thenear certainty that the Erhard government would fall, and that if wetook the McNamara line, we would be blamed. Irritated, McNamaraleaned across the Cabinet table and said, "You can't prove that." LBJ


leaned back in his chair so as to be slightly behind his defensesecretary's line of sight, and gave me a cheerful wink.)

Some opponents of bridge-building blamed Erhard's fall on thePresident's October 7 speech, specifically the statement thatbuilding "mutual trust" between East and West was a precondition forthe reunification of Germany-a statement that brought U.S.declaratory policy into line with what had been the de facto U.S.position for a long time. I think that view too is mistaken. As ErikBlumenfeld had pointed out in September, Erhard was on his way outfor internal German reasons. Nothing the U.S. could have said aboutunification or done about offset would have saved him.

Last afterthought. Immediately after taking office, Kiesinger,making a great show of not being ("unlike Erhard") Washington'spatsy, made overtures toward de Gaulle and complained publicly aboutthe alleged U.S. habit of acting without consulting. LBJ didn't muchlike this, in part because it made it harder for him to hold offMansfield. Some have accused him of being too sensitive to mediaflack. Perhaps he was. No president likes it. But people like DavidBruce (U.S. Ambassador in London) who thought "LBJ's hypersensitivityto newspaper gossip . . . disturbing, unwise and undignified," failedto acknowledge the effect of stories like that on the President'sability to produce the outcome he was trying to produce. So, in thiscase, he had McCloy make it very clear to Kiesinger that dealing withJohnson through the press wouldn't work very well. By the time of theKiesinger visit the next August, it all got straightened out. Thevisit was a success and sealed the result produced by the TrilateralNegotiations. (For a nice example of LBJ's approach: tell me aboutyour problems, then I'll tell you about mine, and we'll try to workit out, one can't do better than read the transcript of his longprivate conversation with Kiesinger.)

****************

By telling the stories of each of the other issues listed earlier,one could demonstrate over and over that the way LBJ went aboutthings had much to do with producing good outcomes. Because I amrunning out of time, however, I'll summarize only briefly.

On the involvement of Germany in nuclear matters, he decided, in theface of contrary advice from both the Secretary and the UnderSecretary of State, that getting Moscow to join in sponsoring theNonproliferation Treaty was much more important than keeping open thehypothetical option of some kind of jointly-owned nuclear force withGerman participation. The latter had very little support outside ofBonn and the State Department, it was unlikely to provide Germanswith a lasting sense of participation (it was too clearly a bit of asham), it would not get London (lukewarm at best) or Paris (bitterlyopposed) to give up their own national forces, it had no militaryvalue, and it would arouse bitter opposition in the Congress. TheState Department's idea of using U.S. leverage to induce the otherEuropeans, and most especially Britain, to join in such a forcestruck him as foolish. Having gone out of his way to assuage Germaninsecurities in the Trilateral Negotiations, and backed full-fledgedGerman participation in the McNamara proposed NATO Nuclear PlanningGroup, LBJ decided that the NPT was worth the cost of German


disappointment on the issue of keeping open the option of a jointnuclear force. Surely he was right, and his most senior diplomaticadvisors were wrong.

On the Kennedy Round, by repeatedly overruling Agriculture SecretaryFreeman and Commerce Secretary Connor, he made possible a large-scaleindustrial bargain. We even made a little progress in liberalizingagriculture. If one believes, as I do, that the American effort toliberalize world trade contributed in a major way to the growth inliving standards during the past half century, the Kennedy Round wasa landmark. Once again, LBJ's conviction that liberalizing trade wasa good thing, combined with a sharp sense of what was and was notnegotiable-and his good sense in realizing that numerical estimatesof the effect of given tariff reductions on the U.S. trade balance inthe long-run future were both absurdly unreliable and essentiallyirrelevant to a sensible, non-mercantilist judgment about theeconomic benefits of those reductions-played a critical role inassuring a successful out-come. (Throughout, he kept close control ofall the major strategic choices. To make sure of that during the lastclimactic weeks of the negotiation, and to bypass the large and leakyCabinet committee on trade, he instructed me to set up and chair asmall "control group" of senior officials, responsible directly tohim, to backstop the negotiating team in Geneva, with allcommunication back and forth under tight White House control [LimdisPotatoes].)

Johnson also played a critical role in the successful handling ofthe various international financial matters: the monetary reformnegotiations, the pound sterling, and, most notably, the U.S.payments imbalance-the handling of which had a lot to do with makingpossible the good outcomes achieved in trade, in the Trilaterals, andindirectly, even in the resolution of the NATO crisis. In particular,his calm good sense about the U.S. payments deficit and gold-in theface of a lot of alarmist advice from the Cabinet officers mostdirectly involved and contrary to the almost unanimous view of theprivate financial community-was, I think, astonishing. After all,open-economy macroeconomics wasn't exactly his cup of tea, and hecertainly wouldn't have described the international financialsituation in the terms in which I have described it. Yet hisquestions, comments, and decisions implicitly reflected at least atentative, if occasionally reluctant, acceptance of the essentials ofthe above view, informed by some powerful, strongly held intuitionsabout American priorities.1

To be more specific, I know that he did not think that a run on theU.S. gold stock which led to a cessation of dollar-goldconvertibility would be a first-order national disaster to be avoidedat all costs. Obviously, he would not have welcomed a financialcrisis-what president would? But he did not react negatively when ona number of occasions I explained my somewhat heretical "not the endof the world" opinions on the subject. On one occasion that sticks inmy mind he said gruffly, and I thought a bit incautiously, to a startledWilliam McChesney Martin (Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board),something to the effect that "I will not deflate theAmerican economy, screw up my foreign policy by gutting aid orpulling troops out, or go protectionist just so we can continue topay out gold to the French at $35 an ounce." He had observed Treasury


Secretary Douglas Dillon and Under Secretary Robert Roosa using thethreat of a run on gold to put pressure on President Kennedy to delaya tax cut. I suspect he didn't much like it, and wasn't about to letanything like that happen to him. He had very definite views aboutrelations between presidents and Cabinet officers, and about thedifference between advice and pressure.

A related Johnson intuition concerned our efforts to keep HaroldWilson from devaluing the pound. He realized that a sterlingdevaluation might conceivably start a chain reaction of competitivedevaluations that could lead to an even more overvalued dollar or arun on the U.S. gold stock (or both, seriatim)-not a happy prospect.But he clearly didn't buy the notion that the $2.80 pound mattered tous more than the Wilson government's pending decisions about Britishmilitary deployments East of Suez, or what line London would take inthe Kennedy Round and the monetary negotiations, or on trimming theBritish Army on the Rhine, especially as it might affect his abilityto defeat the Mansfield Resolution calling for large cuts in U.S.forces in Europe (cuts that would badly unsettle German politicsalready unsettled by the French withdrawal from NATO). Those were allchoices that would be powerfully affected by the health of theBritish economy.

There was a personal point too. In dealing with Wilson, just as indealing with Erhard about the French divisions in Germany, Johnsondisliked being put in a position akin to that of a majority leaderpressuring a senior committee chairman on a matter that was obviouslyof far greater consequence to the other fellow. And as with Erhard,he needed Wilson's support on other issues. Obviously he would nothave welcomed a financial blowup. But he had a clear sense of what hethought were U.S. priorities, and maintaining the sterling exchangerate or avoiding a run on the U.S. gold stock, though important, werenot on the top of his list of what most mattered. (My judgmentconcerning LBJ's views about all this reflects the many opportunitiesI had during 1965-67 to talk with him about these matters, as well ashow and what he decided in response to the memoranda I wrote him andduring the course of his numerous small meetings on internationaleconomic issues and on European policy.)

In relation to the balance of payments, I should add that, onceactual GDP had caught up with potential GDP in late 1965, pretty mucheveryone in the administration dealing with economic policy thought,including the President, that the macroeconomic situation called for alarge tax increase that would curb the consumption of the non-poor andthereby free up the resources slated for the Vietnam War and for theincreased consumption of the beneficiaries of transfer paymentsgenerated by various Great Society initiatives. Along with a snugmonetary policy, such a tax increase would have reduced-thoughprobably not eliminated, at least not without help from a cheaperdollar-the payments deficit. The debate was about whether we shouldpay the price that a reluctant Congress and a very reluctant Ways andMeans Committee would exact to enact a tax increase.

Until 1967, the President thought the price too high. He refused tofollow Henry Fowler's advice to call it a "war tax" linked toVietnam, and appeal to the Congress and the country in his capacityas commander in chief. In private conversation Johnson gave three


reasons. First, he believed that it would start a divisive nationaldebate that would wreck both the civil rights and the other GreatSociety legislation (he thought the "War on Poverty" a major part ofhis civil rights strategy and vice versa). Second, he was convincedit would make it even harder for him to hold off the proponents of awider war who were urging him to invade North Vietnam and bomb up tothe Chinese border, ignoring the risk of Chinese intervention. Last,he feared that in both Moscow and Washington it would strengthen themany bitter opponents of his attempt to "thaw the Cold War."

That attempt-"bridge building"-mattered to Johnson. He thought that,in combination with containment/deterrence, prolonged exposure to howeconomics and politics were conducted in Western Europe and NorthAmerica would, over the long run, make more likely a gradual changein perception in Moscow-a change that would be conducive to what infact happened during 1985-89. And in the short run, he thought thatkeeping lines open-a policy of active engagement-would help reducenuclear danger.

Three further points:

* It is not true, as is sometimes alleged, that the impulse for"bridge building" came from staff, nor that the President had to bepushed into it. As often with Johnson, the evidence can mislead. Whenhe agreed to do something one was urging him to do - make someone anAssistant Secretary or judge, send up a bill - he would often feignreluctance,stressing that he was doing it only as a favor to you, evenwhen he had already decided to do it for his own reasons. And when asemi-public show of presidential reluctance would serve a usefulpurpose, he would make certain the story would "leak." The Senateleader doing his thing again.

* It is not true that Vietnam got in the way. Certainly it didn't inWashington, and I very much doubt whether it did in Moscow. Peoplewho say that it must have (citing no evidence), misjudge howhard-nosed that Politburo was about its own priorities. The fact isthat they did agree to the Nonproliferation Treaty, did come toGlassboro, did agree to a fall '68 summit in Leningrad - which wecancelled after the invasion of Czechoslovakia. Put the other way,absent Vietnam, would they not have squashed Prague that spring?Would a Gorbachev have arisen earlier? Would they have been willingto let East Germany go rather than resort to force? Not likely. Thosethings happened only after the Soviet system's pervasive internalbankruptcy-and I don't think SDI or a 7 percent versus 4 percent U.S.defense budget had anything to do with that-had become much moreapparent than it was in the late '60s, and a postwar generation ofpragmatically minded Soviet politicians, increasingly exposed to howthings worked in "normal" countries, were willing to risk radicalmeasures to try to improve their country's future.

* For a concise statement of what "bridge building" was about, and ofJohnson's European policy in general, one can do no better than read

his October 7, 1966 speech on Europe to the National Conference ofEditorial Writers in New York. It was in every sense his speech andreflected his convictions about how the United States shouldapproach the central issue of the Cold War: the de facto occupationof East-Central Europe by the Soviets. By explaining that an improved


East-West environment-"a surer foundation of mutual trust"-was anecessary pre-condition for the unification of Germany, iteffectively reversed what had until then been the declared Americanposition, and, as noted, provided American backing for the subsequentshift in West German policy toward Ostpolitik. Astoundingly, in noneof the critical discussions of Johnson's European policy that Irecall-for example, those that assert its non-existence-is there anyreference made to that foundation document, or, for that matter, tothe day-to-day specifics of his conduct of European policy; a genuinecasualty of Vietnam.2 (Professor Thomas Schwartz of VanderbiltUniversity is currently at work on a book-length study of Johnson andEurope; it will fill an important void.)

A final remark. It has been said that Lyndon Johnson was no good atforeign policy, that when he did get involved he relied on hisanti-communist impulses and hawkish Kennedy advisors, splitting thedifference when they disagreed. I have tried to explain why I thinkthat opinion is wrong, and why I believe that a thorough, factuallybased examination of the history would decisively refute the negativeview.

I look forward to your questions.

Questioner: Will you comment on Johnson's decision making methodsin foreign affairs?

Francis Bator: Many writers have described his methods asdisorderly and not conducive to serious exploration of importantchoices. Invariably, they cite decisions about Vietnam. I believethat with respect to Vietnam, that description misses the point, thatthe decision making process was not the cause but the result of thePresident's decision to escalate. With respect to non-Vietnam foreignpolicy, and specifically policy vis-à-vis Europe and the SovietUnion-the policies discussed in this paper-the description is I thinkquite wrong. At least it is wrong if the test is whether, when itcame to important decisions, the President was given a full andtimely crack at the choices as they really were. Did the governmentconfront him with a good "map" of reality, a hard specification ofthe choices and contingent consequences and uncertainties-direct andindirect, short and long term-of the slate of feasible actions? Didexecution reflect his will and intent after he had been confronted bysuch a "map" and exposed, face to face on important matters, to thesharply stated views of, and arguments among, his principal advisors,including the advisors who had institutional standing in the matter?Judged by those tests, I believe a fact-minded examination of therecord would, once again, reveal it to be not at all bad.3 (Thenotion that Johnson didn't have enough time for non-Vietnam foreignpolicy is moonshine. I can testify that on issues of European policy,and foreign economics, whatever presidential time and attention wasneeded was invariably available.)

Questioner: Was President Johnson a paper reader or did he takehis information orally?

Francis Bator: Both. When he thought something important-or if hegrew to trust your judgment about knowing what was and wasn'timportant-he would listen with great intensity. As Abe Fortas said


about him, he was a packrat for information. At the same time he wasa voracious reader of memoranda-he went through a large pile of"night reading" put next to his bed every evening. Putting somethingin his night reading was a good way to get him into or bring him up todate on a problem, or to get him to make a decision by checking "O.K."next to an option, or "None of the above," or "See me." If you went to seehim, handing him a half-page reminder was a good way to get him to focus - toavoid his starting to talk about whatever else was on his mind, what I came tothink of as his "Act 1 mode."

Johnson was a marvelously funny and original talker, anextravagantly inventive raconteur, who often used talk for nervousrelief. One had to learn to distinguish between what I came to thinkof as his Act 1 and Act 2 modes. Act 1 was when much of what he saidwas intended either to induce his audience to do something Johnsonwanted them to do ("the treatment"), or, as often as not, toentertain, tease ("Bator thinks the Hill is in Boston"), and - notinfrequently - to let off steam. Act 2 was when he would focus sharplyon the business at hand. When in an Act 1 mode, like many goodstorytellers, he would exaggerate and embellish (great-grandfather atthe Alamo/San Jacinto)-literal truth was not the point; if you didn'tunderstand that, he'd think you a bit of a fool. And every now andthen - when the need for nervous relief had become especially acute - hewould build up a Texas-sized head of steam and lose all sense of time.

The point of starting a short meeting by handing him a half-pagenote on the choices was to reduce the chance of a ten-minute Act 1 bythe end of which Marvin Watson would stick his head in the door tosay that Senator Russell or whoever was waiting, and you were out ofthere with no decision.

The Act 1/Act 2 distinction is essential in interpreting thehistorical record-telephone tapes, minutes of meetings, interviews,the myriad stories about him. Even in serious meetings, with nosupernumeraries present, only advisors who had standing in the matterat hand-as often as not the President would start with a bit of Act1. Here is an example. Toward the end of the Trilateral NegotiationsI spoke of, it appeared that the British needed a commitment of anadditional $40 million U.S. defense purchase in the U.K. to enableHarold Wilson to fight off people who were trying to get him to cutthe BAOR. McNamara and Fowler were strongly against it. The Presidentstarted the meeting by bitching about the Brits, yes he loved them,Churchill was his hero, but they always had their hands in ourpockets, and the Germans, fine people even though they went nuts nowand then, he knew them well, his Fredericksburg grandmother was German, butthey were stingy as hell, and with the Congress squeezing every penny outof his poverty budget and Mills, stubborn as an ox, refusing to raisetaxes . . . and so on and on, funny, outrageous, it was hard not tolaugh-and he loved a responsive audience. McNamara and Fowler joinedin, very much in the same vein. Anyone listening to the first fifteenminutes of that meeting who didn't understand about Act 1 would havegiven odds against Johnson approving a single penny. Then, however,if one was watching for the signs, one could notice the Presidentgradually pulling back from the conversation, glancing at the shortnote on his blotter. It was at that moment that Joe Fowler-a veryfine Treasury Secretary, but a bit shy of Lyndon Johnson- made themistake of another Act 1 remark. The President leaned across the


table and said something like 'Listen, Joe, it's a middle-sizedpoverty grant to New York City, you don't really want me to screw upthe alliance for that. . . .'

Anyone who tries to interpret Johnson on the basis of Act 1talk-anyone who never observed him or dealt with him in an Act 2mode-will have a badly skewed impression. Act 1 talk was full ofexaggeration and tall tales, sometimes emotional, even intemperate,and at times, when he felt especially beleaguered, studded withcommunists under the bed or imagined Bobby Kennedy plots-he wasalmost as prone to 'paranoia' about RFK as RFK was unfair and proneto 'paranoia' about him, and LBJ had more cause. The presidency is apressure-cooker, and Johnson was a very emotional man who inheritedin Vietnam a horrendous lose/lose choice. But during the course ofsome three years of dealing with him, I never saw him make aserious decision when he wasn't in his Act 2 mode-sharp, focussed,operational, and intensely fact-and evidence-minded. And there was noone around who was smarter, and I don't mean just shrewd, I meananalytically smart. Many of the issues I brought him were highlytechnical as well as political. He never missed a beat, and wouldremember months later exactly what one had said to him. If all thecontrary lore about him, based on Act 1 stories and observations,makes you doubt it, remember that for many years, as Senate leader,he maintained unprecedented mastery of ninety-five purposefulprima-donnas, countless pieces of intricate legislation involving ahost of complicated issues, foreign as well as domestic, andprocedural subtleties that confounded all but a few experts. Youdon't do that unless you are both very smart and have a tight gripon fact and truth. (During the course of a recent telephone conversation,Walt Rostow reminded me that I once had said to him that if LBJ had goneto the Harvard Law School he would have been president of the Law Review .)

It has been said that Johnson felt outgunned by "the Harvards."Frankly, I think the notion plain silly. He respected brains, and nodoubt regretted that he didn't have a highbrow education. But he knewperfectly well that he was as smart as anyone around, and was nodoubt irritated by some of the patronizing nonsense to the contrarywritten about him. With his size and big features, uncanny ability tosize up people, quick wit and inventively bawdy humor always at theready, he dominated any room he entered, the more so as president.(Johnson described his vice presidency, when his proper role was toplay wallflower-I heard Mac Bundy say, admiringly, that LBJ playedthe, for him totally unnatural, part admirably-as sheer torture. Oncewhen Jack Valenti was trying to nudge him toward the Mansion for hiscustomary midday nap, he looked down on Jack, half his size, and saidin his deepest Texas drawl, 'Listen, if the vice presidency didn'tkill me, nothing will kill me.' Incidentally, it's worth saying thatLBJ's language, though pretty colorful at times, was generally bothfunny and on point. He had a very rich vocabulary and, unlike hissuccessor, didn't have to resort to expletives as fillers.)

Questioner: What do you mean by the Johnson "treatment"?

Francis Bator: It came in many flavors. A small example. Trying topersuade a congressman to vote yes on some amendment, President leadsthe fellow into the Rose Garden, takes him gently by the lapels, andstarts marching him up and down in the 90-degree Washington heat.


Whatever the President is saying to him-I don't think itmatters-within minutes it's obvious from the fellow's face-he isnearly a foot shorter than Johnson-that he would gladly trade hiswife, children, and dog just to get out of there. Back in thesuper-air-conditioned office, President looking none the worse forwear, thanks the man for his offer of help, ushers him out the door,and, rubbing his enormous hands together, remarks with a cheerfulgrin, 'Mighty warm out there.'

Questioner: How large was the NSC staff during your tenure in theWhite House?

Francis Bator: During the Kennedy and Johnson years, the NSC staffwas not like it has been since 1969, a substantial "institution" withdirectors of this and that. There was no such thing as an "NSCposition" on a policy issue. Besides the Special Assistant to thePresident for National Security Affairs, and excluding support people,the staff consisted of four or five senior officers serving as the President'sforeign policy staff, each with one or two junior officers helping him. (Thegrander-sounding "national security advisor" title-not an officialdesignation-was a post-1968 invention, first used by Henry Kissinger;the job-or at least the way I think it ought to be done-has remainedthe same.)

Typically one or two of the seniors on the NSC staff hadpresidential accounts of their own. During the course of the decade,four of the latter held presidential appointments as Deputy SpecialAssistants and became members of the White House Office so called,which contained in those days only about 27 officers all told,including the President himself, the Social Secretary and the WhiteHouse Usher. Nowadays that office numbers something like 120individuals in other than support roles. (The White House and themajor departments concerned with foreign and security policy areexceedingly hierarchical places. Trivial-sounding differences intitle and rank can affect how vulnerable you are to being end-run orfrozen out by people on the other side of an issue, whether you haveto fight to get into a meeting or your hands on highly classifiedcables, or whatever. Also, when working 12-15 hour days, and with adozen balls in the air at the same time, it makes a differencewhether you can read memoranda and scan the morning papers in theback of an air-conditioned White House car that picked you up on yourdoorstep, or have to fight your way through the Connecticut Ave.traffic.)

Smallness matters. For example, if one person with just twosubstantive assistants and no other substantive staff has to keep aneye on the flow of major, cross-cutting European and foreign economicbusiness being done by different parts of State, Defense, Treasury,Commerce-at least all the business that is or might becomepresidential business (with an active, control-minded president thatis a lot of business)-he or she has to reach out personally and buildgood working relations laterally and up and down with the appropriateCabinet officers, Assistant Secretaries, key staff people andexperts. You need them. And as long as it is clear that youpersonally carry the President's flag on a set of issues (here again,size is critical), they'll respond, because they need you-especiallywhen those issues are the business of more than one department-which


is true of most major issues-or require presidential involvement.

Questioner: What was it like working for President Johnson? Didyou know him-did he know you-when you started working for him? Ifnot, how did that evolve?

Francis Bator: It took a while. After watching me for a somemonths (I don't recall exactly when), Mac Bundy, who had hired me (hewas Johnson's national security assistant during the first half ofmy stint at the White House), told me to keep sending my memorandathrough him but to start signing them myself: "The President has to learnwho is doing his work on this stuff; I don't want to keep having to translateHungarian economics into Texan." So I did, and slowly LBJ got used todealing with me. Slowly. He hated new faces ('Who is this fellowusing my switchboard, stationery, and car-pool telling me what GeorgeBall and McNamara think about this or that; when he says something isso, is it? Does he pretend that he is speaking for me when he isreally speaking for himself? . . .'). In a way, he is dependent onyou and until he has calibrated you he doesn't like it.

An early example: a letter to him from Prime Minister Douglas-Homeabout some complicated, relatively unimportant but politicallysensitive North Atlantic shipping imbroglio needs a prompt answer.You get the relevant departments to produce memos-they are typicallylong, complicated, tell him things he doesn't need to know and don'ttell him things he does, and grind a lot of departmental axes.You cross-examine the experts in and out of the government, checkwith the relevant officials and staff on the Hill, make yourself aninstant expert, write him a page-and-a-half memo summarizing theissues, draft alternative replies for his signature, put them on topof the stuff from the departments for his night reading. He can spendten minutes on the problem, or 30, but not three hours-remember hehas 25 other things going on that need his prompt attention.Willy-nilly, he is dependent on your memo, or your answers when hechecks "See me." Sure, until he really gets to know you-hascalibrated you-he'll check up on what you tell him, test you in allsorts of ways. Johnson did, for some months, until one had earned histrust-until he figured out whether or not you are a stickler forfacts, won't pretend you know something when you don't, are fair orunfair when reporting the views of others (especially when you thinkthey are mistaken), know or don't know how to keep your mouth shut,try to flatter him and pull your punches or argue with him when youthink he is wrong, know who is President when he has made a decision,tend to be a little soft on the British, perhaps too hard on theGermans, aware even if in hopelessly amateurish fashion of hisCongressional relations, are protective of him or in business foryourself etc., etc. So it takes time, and it can be rough attimes-and more hazardous when he is flattering you to see if it turnsyour head.

Speaking of the White House switchboard-it was a powerfulinstrument, presided over by a bunch of remarkable women. Once youwere on their list, they'd track you down-or the person you weretrying to reach- any time of day or night no matter where on earthyou or he/she happened to be, and I mean wherever. (I can't resisttelling you a funny story that I just remembered, even though it'snot really on point. A few months after I left the government, having


repeatedly failed to get my then Harvard colleague Henry Kissinger onthe phone from my Cambridge office-his office was two blocks away-I calledthe switchboard and asked the operator lady on the line who knew me wellto call Kissinger's office and say only that the White House wascalling. It took all of three seconds to get Henry on the line-"Wherethe hell are you?" said he when he heard my voice and at that momentI heard a faint "click" on the line. A couple of minutes after wefinished talking, the telephone rang, it was my operator friend: "Iowe you an apology, Mr. Bator, I couldn't resist listening in for asecond.")

Questioner: I am not sure I understand what you mean when you saythat, when it came to Vietnam, the decision making process was theresult and not the cause of President Johnson's decision to escalate.Could you explain?

Francis Bator: I believe that nothing matteredmore to Lyndon Johnson than passing the civil rights and socialwelfare legislation that had been piling up since Roosevelt's NewDeal ground to a halt during the course of FDR's second term. Withthe extra northern seats Johnson had picked up in 1964, he would havea two-year window, if in the interim he could avoid a divisivenational debate about Vietnam. That meant not copping out onEisenhower's and Kennedy's commitment to keep Saigon from going downthe drain-during the spring of '65 it was sinking fast. It meantavoiding an open row with the generals about what it would take tokeep it from going down the drain-in other words doing enough to keepthem from complaining to their friends on the Hill that the commanderin chief was not backing up the soldiers already in the field. Mostominously, it meant avoiding a guns v. butter confrontation, in otherwords doing the minimum the generals would sit still for-in effect,going to war-without a serious attempt to build a strong base ofpublic understanding and support.

If I am right-and no other hypothesis explains his whollyuncharacteristic decision to march totally naked into a war he knewmight end up badly-Johnson had to contrive a decision making processthat would enable him to do what he was determined to do without everowning up to what was really going on in his head. A president cannotsay to his secretaries of State and Defense, never mind to thecountry at large, that he has decided to take the country to war because if hedid not do so, Voting Rights and Medicare, due for conference that July, wouldfail, and the country, with its cities about to burn, would once again havedemonstrated itself unable to face up to its most shameful legacy.

I do not say that if it hadn't been for Voting Rights, Medicare, andall that, Johnson would have called it quits in Vietnam in 1965. ButI do believe he would have been much more cautious and incremental.He would have constructed for himself a golden bridge of retreat byemphasizing that in the end it was Saigon's war to win or lose, thatwe couldn't do it for them, and that the American interest reachedjust so far. And in typical Johnsonian fashion, he would havelaunched a massive program of public explanation.

Obviously this is not a story subject to open-and-shut confirmation-what was going on in LBJ's mind is unknowable, strictly speaking. ButI know of no other hypothesis that fits all the facts and this one


does. Lyndon Johnson, instinctively attentive to his own futurepolitical effectiveness, knew in his bones that this was a hazardousenterprise. He hoped that Hanoi and the NLF would decide to negotiateus out, with a "decent interval" long enough to avoid a domesticblowup, but he knew very well that they might instead choose to fightindefinitely rather than risk another Geneva. He knew that oncecasualty reports started coming in, the public's then (shallow)hawkishness wouldn't last, and that the hawks who remained hawkswould desert him unless he did what he knew he would not do, invadethe North, thereby risking another Chinese-American war. He said manytimes that Truman's great mistake had been not to ask Congress for adeclaration of war. Yet he chose to march to war alone.4

A couple of years ago, when I explained what I believe to have beenJohnson's reasons for doing what he did in the spring of '65 to avery able young lawyer friend, he said something like "It can't havebeen that bad." Plainly, he thought that sending Marines to war forthe Voting Rights Act- assuming it was so-was outrageous on its face.I told him I did not agree. Ultimately, all of foreign policy has tobe judged by its consequences for the viability of the United Statesas a decentralized, open, and by-design inefficiently-governedrepublic. Specific instances aside, at the level of first principle,it seems to me not at all obvious that maintaining an independentnon-communist Southeast Asia, or South Korea, or Berlin, or Kuwait is, at themargin, a qualitatively more legitimate reason for going to war than endingthe scandalous disenfranchisement of 13 percent of the citizenry ongrounds of race.

Because, in every case, the viability of the U.S. as aconstitutional republic has to be a part of the calculus, procedurallegitimacy is of course a major consideration. But not, I think, inall possible cases is it lexicographically decisive. It depends onthe situation-one has to consider the tradeoffs. We elect presidentsto make some unmentionable tradeoffs. (It is not hard to dream uphypotheticals that would cause even a stickler for constitutionallegitimacy to want to think it over. And one doesn't have to rely onoff-the-wall hypotheticals. FDR blatantly violated the law during1940-41, and thank heaven he did. Or think about Jefferson and theLouisiana Purchase.)

Questioner: Could you say something about the role of the NSCstaff in the policy process in the Johnson administration? You say itwas your job to keep an eye on what was going on in the governmentinvolving our relations with Europe and international economics. Whatdid that involve?

Francis Bator: I should start by saying that I was immenselyhelped by two superb junior colleagues, Edward Hamilton and LawrenceEagleburger, both of whom later went on to greater things. After abit, Hamilton, the senior of the two, besides helping me, covered theforeign aid part of the economics business on his own-I just stayedout of his way. On important European matters, Walt Rostow, whosucceeded Mac Bundy as the national security advisor (to use thenewfangled description)-and who had been a distinguished seniorcolleague at the M.I.T. Center for International Studies and was agood and supportive friend-would file his own views and activelyparticipate in meetings with the President.5


Most of the time, much of the day-to-day business of relations withother governments and international organizations-the part of thebusiness that has not before been brought under more centralized orcoordinated control-is carried on by the relevant offices in State,Defense, Treasury, Agriculture, and the rest, each dealing with itscounterpart abroad according to its understanding of existing policyinterpreted to reflect its own institutional concerns, often but notalways working through our and their embassies. A critical task of apresidential foreign-affairs staff officer-call it identification andearly warning-was to keep a sharp lookout for situations, clusters ofcross-cutting issues where that on-going decentralized process, orthe arrangements for coordination that were in place, were likely toproduce a mess, or outcomes contrary to what the President mightwant, result in lost opportunities, or prematurely narrow thePresident's options.

Having identified such a case-perhaps it was flagged for you by acolleague in State who thought that Defense and Treasury were aboutto produce a mess, or vice versa-and, if the situation was of sufficientimportance, having brought it to the attention of the President, youare likely to have participated in and often shepherded thepre-decision process of inter-departmental review. You would havebriefed the President, coordinated the paperwork coming to him fromthe departments, summarized for him the options and arguments,organized, staffed, and monitored his meetings with the Cabinetofficers or other advisors whose views he would want to hear face toface or who have standing in the matter. Last-and at least Johnsonwould insist on this-you will have told him what you think.Occasionally, when the existing arrangements for coordination werenot working well, it was your job to try to contrive new ad hocworking groups of relevant officials, high enough to control what wasgoing on in their departments and speak for their secretaries. Forauthority you may have had to get the President's O.K., and sometimesan explicit presidential order, perhaps in the form of a NSAM. (Suchad hoc task groups sometimes evolved into semi-permanent ongoingcommittees that might last several administrations.) 6

Cabinet officers didn't invariably welcome the intrusion of WhiteHouse staff into their business. A small example. I was in the middleof explaining some problem to the President in the recently notoriouslittle hideaway office next to the Oval Office-when the Presidentinvited Bob McNamara, who had stuck his head in on his way from someearly evening meeting of Joe Califano's, for a quick drink. ThePresident says "Francis is telling me about such and such." Bob,giving me a dirty look, says "Mr. President, you shouldn't have tobother your head about that, Dean and I will settle it. "Conversationturns to other matters. McNamara having finished his drink excuseshimself ("Marge is waiting"), President grins cheerfully at me andsays "Well, Francis, are we going to let ol' Bob and Dean settle thatone?" Make no mistake, Johnson loved McNamara (though he was driven alittle crazy by him), and in a different southern-old-boy way lovedDean Rusk. But he knew well that they hated to argue with each other(especially Rusk with McNamara) and would most likely "settle" theproblem by arbitrarily slicing the baby in half: this is defense,that's foreign policy. It was a not infrequent problem-on their wayto a small meeting in the Cabinet Room to hash out a State-Defense


disagreement, McNamara would pull Rusk into the Fish Room and then atthe meeting they (usually Bob) would tell the President that they hadsolved it. LBJ would say something like "tell me about it" and itbecame the job of staff to make certain that the very realdisagreement that had been heatedly argued by the responsibleAssistant Secretaries and had been the reason for the meeting wouldreceive a full presidential hearing.

The historian Dennis Brogan, with a reputation for writing acerbicunsigned book-reviews for The Economist is alleged to have oncebeen asked how he managed to make them all come out at exactly 800words. "It's easy" he is supposed to have said. "I type 800 words andstop." So-having run outof time-I'll stop. Thank you for coming.

Endnotes

1. With permission from the Brookings Institution, I repeat here,and in my further remarks on international financial matters, some ofwhat I wrote in a short paper published in Economic Events, Ideasand Policies: The 1960s and After, edited by George L. Perry andJames Tobin, Brookings Institution, 2000.

2. Immediately after the speech, stories started going around aboutits origins that I knew to be false. Having had responsibility forthe preparation and coordination of the speech, I knew pretty muchwhere every word came from. The important point of course is that thespeech, its content, tone, and emphasis were Lyndon Johnson's,reflecting his view of the world and his priorities; my files in theLBJ Library contain the relevant documentation and an account of thefacts. They are worth noting because the false story implies thatJohnson's own convictions, e.g., about the change in declaratorypolicy on German unification, played virtually no part in the designof the speech. Not so. Briefly, the facts are as follows.In a joint memorandum of May 18, 1966, Walt Rostow and I urged the

President to consider making a major speech on European policy. Theidea was taken up in early June in the so-called Acheson Group reportthat was itself a response to an April 22 presidential instructiondealing mostly with NATO that also called for the development ofbridge-building initiatives addressed to Eastern Europe and theSoviet Union (National Security Action Memorandum [NSAM] No. 345). OnJuly 8, in a NSAM devoted to bridge building (No. 352), the Presidentnotified all the relevant department heads that he had instructed theSecretary of State to "develop areas of peaceful cooperation with thenations of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union" . . . and propose tohim "specific actions the Government might take . . . to help createan environment in which peaceful settlement of the division ofGermany and of Europe will become possible." On August 16 I providedthe President with a four-page outline of themes for a "majorframework-setting speech" on Europe in the autumn, perhaps before the"newspaper editors or a major university." It suggested as one themethat "efforts to improve the East-West environment" leading to"increasingly open relations with the East are a necessary conditionfor a European settlement." The first full draft of what in revisedform became the speech was written by Nathaniel Davis, a seniorforeign-service officer temporarily assigned to my office. I hadasked Davis to try his hand at a draft along the lines of my August


16 outline and a verbal summary of what the speech should contain.Both the outline and the Davis draft reflected what I knew to beLBJ's convictions, specifically on "bridge building" as aprecondition for German unification. (As usual, I knew his views onthese matters not from a single extended conversation-that isn't theway he worked-but from dozens of his comments and interjectionsduring the course of our routine conversations on related questions,from frequent exposure to his views in lots of small meetings on Europeanmatters for which I had done his staff work, and from his reaction tomy many working memoranda. I also learned a lot about his views in the courseof helping him prepare for conversations with senior visitingpoliticians from Europe, and drafting his letters to European headsof government, most frequently Harold Wilson.)

3. The beginnings of the French troops in Germany story is a partialcounter-example. A few senior people in State thought that McGeorgeBundy's departure just before the arrival of de Gaulle's NATO letteroffered an opportunity for ridding themselves of interference byWhite House staff. Within weeks-once LBJ made clear that he didn'tlike the consequences, and it became clear also that, on a lot ofmatters, State needed White House help to keep Defense and Treasuryfrom going off on their own-things settled down to normal. (I borrowthe above formulation of what I believe to be the appropriatecriteria for judging organizational performance in apresident-centered administration from my July 25, 1972 Statementbefore the Subcommittee on Foreign Economic Policy of the Committeeon Foreign Affairs,U.S. House of Representatives, pp. 107-121 and 126-137,U.S. Foreign Economic Policy: Implications for the Organization of theExecutiveBranch, July 25, 1972, GPO, Washington, 1972. The testimony alsocontains a detailed description of how the foreign affairs processworked in the Johnson administration, and why I thought then, andstill think, that judged as organization and process in support of apresident determined to keep control of major foreign policy choicesit was a better way to do business than a more formal,institutionalized process on the Eisenhower model would have been.)

4. I derive some comfort from the fact that my Kennedy Schoolcolleague Richard Neustadt shares the above view of what was reallydriving LBJ during the spring and summer of '65. I have profited fromreading his elegant formulation of the hypothesis in a recentUniversity of Essex lecture. (All causal explanations of events areby their nature hypotheses. The best one can say of any suchexplanatory story is that it suffices to account for the relevantfacts, is not incompatible with any, and has the ring of truth, moreso than any competing story.)

5. Personal Note I owe both Mac Bundy and Walt Rostow a greatdeal. Mac brought me to the White House, and taught me by word andexample how to "staff" a president and engage constructively with thebureaucracy. After observing me for a while, he encouraged and helpedme develop an independent relationship with the President. As aresult, when Walt succeeded him as the Special Assistant for NationalSecurity Affairs, I had for some time been doing a lot of workdirectly for the President, first as a senior NSC staff officer andthen as the Deputy Special Assistant. Walt was outstandinglysupportive and generous in what could have been an awkward situation.


(The situation was not unprecedented. As Deputy Special Assistantduring the early months of Bundy's tenure as the Special Assistant,Rostow had his own independent account with JFK, as did Carl Kaysen,the other Deputy Special Assistant during the Kennedy years. Ithelped greatly that in different ways all of us had known each otherfor a long time, had worked together before, were good friends, andfelt honored to be able to help the Presidents we served.)

6. A good example was the so-called Deming Group, set up in responseto a three-page presidential instruction to the Secretary of theTreasury "to organize a small, high-level study group to develop andrecommend to me . . . a comprehensive U.S. position and negotiatingstrategy designed to achieve substantial improvement in internationalmonetary arrangements. The Study Group should consist of appropriatesenior officials from the Treasury, the State Department, the Councilof Economic Advisors, and the White House . . ." The instructionincluded a statement of the problem very much along the linesdescribed above. The group became Joe Fowler's international monetarybrain trust, and continued as the Volcker Group under the Nixonadministration. The President was so proud of his memo to Fowler thathe reprinted it in full in his memoirs, The Vantage Point.-------------------------------------------


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