Controversy erupted again over the United States’ consideration of using nuclear weapons at Khe Sanh. British Prime Minister Harold Wilson used his toast at a White House dinner to inveigh against such an imprudent policy. He was blunter in his appearance on Face the Nation: “Any attempt to escalate this war will be most dangerous…. As for the proposal to use tactical nuclear weapons, this would be sheer lunacy. It would not only be disastrous to America’s position, it would run a very, very great risk of escalation for the world.”46
Johnson succeeded in curbing the speculation. General William Westmoreland, commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam from 1964 to 1968, later regretted that nuclear weapons had not been used. He wrote in his memoirs, “If Washington officials were so intent on ‘sending a message’ to Hanoi, surely small tactical nuclear weapons would be a way to tell Hanoi something.”47
Meanwhile, as popular opposition to the war exploded, Hoover’s FBI did everything it could to disrupt the antiwar movement, as it had been doing to the civil rights movement for years. Hundreds of FBI agents infiltrated antiwar and New Left organizations. In 1968, FBI activities escalated with the deliberate inclusion of New Left groups in the FBI’s ongoing COINTELPRO program. The Church Committee reported on the FBI’s use of friendly news sources throughout the media.48 In 1965, the FBI had twenty-five media assets in the Chicago area and twenty-eight in New Haven.49 The CIA maintained its own stable of media assets. FBI and CIA flacks went to great lengths to mobilize support for the war while marginalizing the war’s critics and impugning their patriotism.
Following Tet, Westmoreland requested another 206,000 troops. Johnson asked Clark Clifford, who was about to replace McNamara as secretary of defense on March 1, to chair a task force reviewing the situation. He assumed that the reliably hawkish senior advisor would support further escalation, but Clifford balked and called together a bipartisan group of “Wise Men.” Following two days of meetings by those elder statesmen, Dean Acheson summed up the consensus view that the country could “no longer do the job we set out to do in the time we have left and we must begin to disengage.”50 Taken by surprise, Johnson was furious. “Everybody is recommending surrender,” he complained.51
In the aftermath of Tet, Johnson’s popularity plummeted. On March 31, he announced that he was not running for reelection. The war had taken another casualty. Johnson would be far from its last.
Vietnam was not the only place where U.S. policy in the 1960s was a disaster. Former Time magazine correspondent and Newsweek editor John Gerassi described the crushing poverty in Peru, which typified conditions throughout Latin America:
more than half the people live outside the money economy altogether…. Of the other half, 80 percent earn $53 a year, while 100 families own 90 percent of the native… wealth…. Of this total, 80 percent is in the hands of just 30 families. Meanwhile, 65 percent of the population is illiterate and 45 percent has never seen a doctor. In Lima, the capital, whose colonial mansions enveloped by ornate wooden balconies help make it one of the most beautiful cities in the world, half of the 1.3 million inhabitants live in rat-infested slums. One, called El Montón, is built around, over, and in the city dump. There, when I visited it, naked children, some too young to know how to walk, competed with pigs for a few bits of food scraps accidentally discarded by the garbage men…. Peruvians… outside the money economy… chew… coca leaves to still hunger pains, and average 500 calories a day. Where there is grass, the Peruvian Andes Indian eats it—and also the sheep he kills when it gets so hungry that it begins tearing another sheep’s wool off for its food. The peons who work the land of the whites average one sol (4 cents) a day, and not only labor from sunup to sundown but must also furnish servants for the master’s hacienda or Lima house.52
As unrest surfaced throughout the continent, policy makers in the United States feared the prospect of more Castro-style revolutions and called for increased training for Latin American militaries and police forces. Brazil was one such case. A longtime U.S. ally, Brazil was perhaps the most strategically significant country in Latin America. It was the fifth largest country in the world—its 75 million people occupied an area larger than the continental United States—and it was rich in resources. In August 1961, Brazil’s president stepped down, handing the reins of power to democratically elected Vice President João Goulart. Goulart pushed for economic and land reform, extension of democratic rights, and legalization of the Communist Party. The United States began planning for his ouster.
The United States implemented a series of measures designed to destabilize the government and precipitate a right-wing military takeover. The Wall Street Journal greased the skids, calling Goulart a “desperately devious, totally ambitious figure whose aim is to seize permanent power and run a fascist state.” In June 1963, the United States cut off all aid to the central government, but increased aid to the military. The Alliance for Progress offered funds to individual states whose governors opposed Goulart. A National Intelligence Estimate the following month reported that “under Goulart, Communists and their sympathizers have achieved… influence over Brazilian policy…. This could lead ultimately to the establishment of an extreme leftist regime with a strongly anti-US character.”53
Johnson met with CIA Director McCone on November 25, 1963, and made it clear that his Latin American policy, much like his Vietnam policy, would differ sharply from Kennedy’s. In December, he appointed Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs Thomas Mann as coordinator for Latin America. Under Mann, the United States abandoned all pretense of promoting reform. Mann thought that Latin America’s military leaders were “a pretty decent group of people.”54 He considered military aid a wiser investment than economic aid, and U.S. policy reflected his priorities. On March 18, at a closed session at the State Department, he unveiled the “Mann Doctrine” to all U.S. ambassadors and chiefs of aid missions in Latin America. He announced that Latin American countries would now be judged on how they promoted U.S. interests, not those of their own people. And the United States would no longer discriminate against right-wing dictators or governments that came to power through military coups. The United States would aggressively protect the $9 billion in U.S. investments in Latin America. Whereas Kennedy had claimed to promote democracy, Johnson would simply support anticommunism.