“You must be sincere,” he warned. “You must sign this confession as proof that you wish your crew to be treated leniently and humanely. The evidence is complete. Why do you not sign?”
“Because of all the lies it contains about my country,” the panting captain replied.
“The world must know about the United States’ imperialistic warmongering,” Super C declared. He sounded genuinely upset. Bucher figured he was desperate for a signature. Yet in spite of the universe of suffering that still could be inflicted on him, the skipper said no.
“We will see,” Super C snapped. His tone suggested that a sharp escalation of brutality was about to commence. “We will now begin to shoot your crew. We will shoot them one at a time, right here in front of your eyes so that you can see them die. We will shoot them all, starting with the youngest one first and so on, sonabitchi, until you sign confession.
“And if you have not signed when they are all dead, then we still have ways of making you do it, and all your crew will be dead for nothing. You are not sincere. We now bring in the crew member Bland to be shot.”
A guard departed, presumably to get Howard Bland, a ship’s fireman from Arizona who’d recently turned 20. Was Super C bluffing or would he actually kill the young sailor before Bucher’s eyes? The confession, the captain knew, was filled with clumsy English and blatant propaganda. No one in America would believe he’d voluntarily written it. Was it worth gambling Bland’s life to withhold his signature from a collection of obvious lies?
The skipper turned around. Bland stood just outside the door. Bucher couldn’t bring himself to roll the dice.
“All right,” he said resignedly. “I will sign.”
CHAPTER 6
A MINEFIELD OF UNKNOWNS
President Lyndon Baines Johnson sat in a high-backed chair of gleaming dark leather, his forehead creased with apprehension. Arrayed around him at a long conference table in the White House Cabinet Room were a dozen of his brightest, most experienced advisers. With the Pueblo crisis less than 24 hours old in Washington, Johnson and his men were struggling to find a way to address it without making it worse.
Several of these men were holdovers from the Kennedy administration, whom Johnson had persuaded to stay on after he ascended to the Oval Office following his youthful predecessor’s assassination. They’d been at LBJ’s side through the euphoria of his landslide 1964 victory over Barry Goldwater, the devastating inner-city riots of 1967, and the long, bloody frustration of Vietnam. There was Dean Rusk, the Georgia farmer’s son who rose to become president of the Rockefeller Foundation and John F. Kennedy’s surprise pick for secretary of state, and who now served Johnson in the same role. There was Walt Rostow, the diminutive former MIT history professor turned Vietnam hawk who advised Johnson on national security. And there was Robert McNamara, the iron-disciplined, data-crunching defense secretary who Johnson feared might be headed for a nervous breakdown—even suicide—under the murderous stresses of running the American military effort in Vietnam. A key architect of the war, McNamara had come to believe it was futile and immoral.
The president’s counselors fell silent as he read aloud from a wire-service account of a purported confession by the Pueblo’s commander, Lloyd Bucher.
North Korean radio had broadcast the statement earlier that day, January 24. A voice the communists identified as Bucher’s claimed the Pueblo had “intruded deep” into North Korean waters while engaged in espionage. The captain condemned his own actions as “criminal” and “a sheer act of aggression,” adding that he and his men hoped they’d be “forgiven leniently” by the government of North Korea. He said the CIA had promised that if the mission went well, he and his men would pocket “a lot of dollars.”
The “confession” was clearly a propaganda sham, reminiscent of forced declarations by U.S. servicemen captured during the Korean War. Besides his fractured grammar, Bucher also had misstated some key facts. He gave his age as 38, not 40, and claimed that the CIA, not the Navy, had sent his ship into the Sea of Japan. But the captain otherwise described his mission accurately and in remarkable detail, noting that the Pueblo had tried to disguise itself as an oceanographic vessel and had eavesdropped on communist military activities near Wonsan, Chongjin, and other ports. Coerced or not, his statement gave the North Koreans a convenient, after-the-fact rationale for seizing his ship: It had violated their territorial waters in order to spy. And they’d wasted no time in broadcasting Bucher’s admission to the world.
Johnson and his men were taken aback by the captain’s damaging words. Had the communists drugged him? Had they threatened to kill him or his crew? LBJ and his advisers knew from the Pueblo’s radio messages that it hadn’t fired a shot. Was it possible that its skipper was a traitor who gave up his ship for money or ideological reasons?
“I frankly do not see how they could get a U.S. Navy commander to make statements like that,” said Rusk.
“Look very closely at his record,” the president ordered. McNamara assured him that an intensive background investigation of Bucher was under way.
As serious as it was, the Pueblo incident was just one of the burdens on Johnson’s shoulders. A few days earlier, a Strategic Air Command B-52 bomber had crash-landed on an ice-covered bay in Greenland, setting off an explosion that blew chunks of four hydrogen bombs around the crash site; U.S. specialists on dogsleds were hunting for radioactive fragments. Thousands of North Vietnamese troops were slowly encircling the isolated Marine firebase at Khe Sanh, in the mountainous northwest corner of South Vietnam. Topping it all off, U.S. intelligence had reports that the Vietcong planned major attacks throughout South Vietnam during the celebration of the lunar new year. The holidays—known as Tet—were just a few days away.
By 1968, the Vietnam War had become a conundrum that not even LBJ, with his legendary skills of political suasion, was able to solve. By turns compassionate and cruel, brilliant and boorish, painfully honest and infinitely devious, Johnson strode the American political landscape like a colossus in the wake of his overwhelming victory over Goldwater. With his volcanic energy and relentless drive, he rammed a head-spinning array of social programs through Congress: Medicare and Medicaid for the elderly and the poor; civil rights and voting rights for African-Americans; protections against air and water pollution; food stamps for the needy; measures to preserve land and expand housing; and numerous consumer protection laws. He created the National Endowment for the Arts, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. He drove his White House aides and an army of federal bureaucrats day and night to eradicate poverty and rebuild the nation’s slums. But, like a fast-growing weed siphoning nutrients away from an orchid, the Vietnam War was draining more and more money from Johnson’s cherished Great Society programs.
Now, the Pueblo, too, demanded the president’s attention. The sheer outrageousness of the seizure made it politically impossible to do nothing. On the other hand, carrying out a retaliatory strike against North Korea—bombing an air base or port, for example—was freighted with risk. Even a single blow could touch off a sharp reaction by Kim Il Sung, up to and including a communist invasion of the south. If that happened, the United States—with thousands of troops encamped along the demilitarized zone—would be quickly embroiled in a new Korean War. With Vietnam straining his military resources to the breaking point and creating combustible divisions in American society, the last thing LBJ needed was another war in Asia. His strong preference was to settle the Pueblo standoff by peaceful means. But he was well aware that, depending on how the situation unfolded, he might have to resort to force.