Election and the Vietnam War
In the presidential elections of 1964, Johnson was opposed by conservative Republican Barry Goldwater. During the campaign Johnson portrayed himself as level-headed and reliable and suggested that Goldwater was a reckless extremist who might lead the country into a nuclear war. When Republican supporters of Goldwater declared, In your heart, you know he's right, Democrats responded by saying, In your heart, you know he might. Goldwater's remark to a reporter that, if he could, he would drop a low-yield atomic bomb on Chinese supply lines in Vietnam did nothing to reassure voters. On election day Johnson defeated Goldwater easily, receiving more than 61 percent of the popular vote, the largest percentage ever for a presidential election; the vote in the electoral college was 486 to 52. Johnson interpreted his victory as an extraordinary mandate to push forward with his Great Society reforms. (See primary source document: Inaugural Address.)
In early August 1964, after North Vietnamese gunboats allegedly attacked U.S. destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin near the coast of North Vietnam without provocation, Johnson ordered retaliatory bombing raids on North Vietnamese naval installations and, in a televised address to the nation, proclaimed, We still seek no wider war. Two days later, at Johnson's request, Congress overwhelmingly passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which authorized the president to take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression. In effect, the measure granted Johnson the constitutional authority to conduct a war in Vietnam without a formal declaration from Congress. Although there were contradictory reports about the engagement in the gulfabout which side did what, if anything, and whenJohnson never discussed them with the public.
Despite his campaign pledges not to widen American military involvement in Vietnam, Johnson soon increased the number of U.S. troops in that country and expanded their mission. In February 1965, after an attack by Viet Cong guerrillas on an U.S. military base in Pleiku, Johnson ordered Operation Rolling Thunder, a series of massive bombing raids on North Vietnam intended to cut supply lines to North Vietnamese and Viet Cong fighters in the South; he also dispatched 3,500 Marines to protect the border city of Da Nang. Fifty thousand additional troops were sent in July, and by the end of the year the number of military personnel in the country had reached 180,000. The number increased steadily over the next two years, peaking at about 550,000 in 1968.
As each new American escalation met with fresh enemy response and as no end to the combat appeared in sight, the president's public support declined steeply. American casualties gradually mounted, reaching nearly 500 a week by the end of 1967. Moreover, the enormous financial cost of the war, reaching $25 billion in 1967, diverted money from Johnson's cherished Great Society programs and began to fuel inflation. Beginning in 1965, student demonstrations grew larger and more frequent and helped to stimulate resistance to the draft. From 1967 onward, antiwar sentiment gradually spread among other segments of the population, including liberal Democrats, intellectuals, and civil rights leaders, and by 1968 many prominent political figures, some of them former supporters of the president's Vietnam policies, were publicly calling for an early negotiated settlement of the war. As his popularity sank to new lows in 1967, Johnson was confronted by demonstrations almost everywhere he went. It pained him to hear protesters, especially studentswhom he thought would venerate him for his progressive social agendachanting, Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today? To avoid the demonstrations, he eventually restricted his travels, becoming a virtual prisoner in the White House.